Sights

The city's historic core centres on the Dom and the lively, tourist-mobbed Römerberg, a medieval public square ringed by reconstructed half-timbered buildings.

The Innenstadt (inner city), Frankfurt’s financial, business and commercial heart, is bounded by the park-lined Main River to the south and elsewhere by a narrow, semicircular band of parks. They follow the route of the city’s medieval walls, torn down between 1806 and 1812.

Heading northwest from the Innenstadt along Bockenheimer Landstrasse brings you to the leafy Westend neighbourhood's parks and stately residential streets lined with grand 19th-century apartments and mansions.

At the area’s southwestern edge is the trade fair ground known as the Messe, which is frenetic during events and desolate outside them. To the north lies the monumental IG-Farbenhaus, which anchors the Westend campus of Goethe Universität (Frankfurt University).

Bockenheimer Landstrasse leads to Bockenheim, centred on the lively main shopping street, Leipziger Strasse.

Quiet residential streets stretch northward from the Innenstadt, forming the Nordend neighbourhood and, to the northeast, Bornheim. Frankfurt’s longest street, Berger Strasse, is the commercial heart of both Nordend and Bornheim. It’s lined with restaurants, cafes, wine bars, pubs and shops. The U4 U-Bahn line runs underneath.

On the southern bank of the Main River, the Sachsenhausen neighbourhood stretches from the Museumsufer (Museum Embankment), Frankfurt’s famed, riverside ‘museum row’, with 13 museums, to the buzzing restaurants and bars in the cobbled streets of Alt-Sachsenhausen (old Sachsenhausen) in the northeastern corner.

Sachsenhausen's periphery has a few U-Bahn and S-Bahn stations (Schweizer Platz, Südbahnhof and Lokalbahnhof) but for many areas trams provide the most convenient transport.