Explore Bandung

The Grand Mosque of Bandung faces the city's alun-alun, the central square. A mosque has stood here since 1812; the present building, with a main dome 30 metres across and two tall minarets, was completed in 2003, when the mosque became West Java's provincial mosque and the square in front was relaid as a lawn.

The Asian-African Conference Museum occupies Gedung Merdeka on Jalan Asia Afrika, an Art Deco club house of 1926 by Van Galen and C. P. Wolff Schoemaker. In April 1955 the building hosted the Asian-African Conference of 29 newly independent countries; the museum shows photographs, documents and objects from the conference, and its main hall can be seen.

Braga Street runs north from Jalan Asia Afrika to Bandung's city hall in the centre of the city. In the 1920s it was the colonial promenade of shops and cafés that earned Bandung the Dutch nickname Parijs van Java, and Art Deco and other Dutch-era buildings still line it, now housing cafés, restaurants and painters' stalls.

Gedung Sate is the seat of the governor of West Java, built from 1920 to 1924 to a design by the Dutch architect J. Gerber for the colonial department of government enterprises. It combines a neoclassical plan with Indonesian elements, and its nickname, satay building, comes from the six spheres on its central pinnacle. A museum on the building's history occupies part of it.

The Geological Museum in Bandung opened in 1929 as the Geologisch Museum of the Dutch East Indies geological survey, in an Art Deco building on Jalan Diponegoro near Gedung Sate. Its halls cover Indonesia's geology, its volcanoes and minerals, and the history of life on Earth, with rocks, minerals and fossils from across the archipelago.

Saung Angklung Udjo is a performance venue, bamboo workshop and school in Padasuka, east Bandung, founded in 1966 by the musician Udjo Ngalagena and his wife Uum Sumiati to keep Sundanese music alive. Its afternoon show in an open bamboo hall presents angklung, puppetry and dance, and the audience is handed angklung to play along.

Djuanda Forest Park is a conservation forest and botanical garden in the Dago hills north of Bandung, named after Djuanda Kartawidjaja, Indonesia's last prime minister. Established in 1965 and now covering about 590 hectares from Dago Pakar to Maribaya, it has forest trails, tall Sumatran pines, waterfalls and two tunnel complexes from the Dutch and Japanese periods.

The Great Asia Africa is a theme park on a hillside along Jalan Raya Lembang in Lembang, north of Bandung, laid out as a series of country pavilions from Asia and Africa. Its buildings copy the architecture of each region, among them an onion-domed palace and a red Chinese-style gate, with shops, food and activities along walkways and bridges.

Bosscha Observatory stands on a former tea plantation in Lembang, about 15 kilometres north of Bandung, at 1,310 metres. Founded in the 1920s by the Dutch East Indies Astronomical Society and named after the tea planter Karel Bosscha, who funded it, it is run by the Bandung Institute of Technology; its white dome houses the Zeiss double refractor. Visits are by scheduled session.

The Al-Jabbar Grand Mosque is West Java's provincial mosque in Gedebage, in the east of Bandung, opened in December 2022. Its lattice of white ribs and glass forms one large roof without a central dome, flanked by four slender minarets, and it stands in a reservoir on former swampland, which gives it the nickname floating mosque. A museum of Islamic history is in the basement.

Floating Market Lembang is a lakeside leisure park in the town of Lembang, in the hills north of Bandung. Food and drink are sold from roofed stall boats moored along the shore, wooden pavilions with tiled roofs stand around the water, and visitors can go out on the lake in small boats.