Explorer Augsbourg

Augsburg Town Hall was built in 1615-1624 by city architect Elias Holl in the Renaissance style, and was the tallest secular building in the world on completion. Its interior includes the Golden Hall, and the gabled facade carries the imperial eagle and the city's pine-cone emblem.

St. Anne's Church is a medieval parish church in Augsburg, built from 1321 as the church of a Carmelite priory and Lutheran since 1548. Its Fugger Chapel, added from 1518 as a burial chapel for the Fugger merchant family, is one of the earliest Renaissance structures north of the Alps and has remained Catholic ever since.

Augsburg Cathedral is a Catholic cathedral dedicated to the Visitation of the Virgin Mary, with a Romanesque core consecrated in 1065 and Gothic additions from the 14th century. Its twin west towers rise 62 metres, and the building stands on a site with church foundations recorded back to the 9th century.

The Schaezlerpalais is a Rococo palace in Augsburg, built between 1765 and 1770 by the architect Carl Albert von Lespilliez. Its gilded mirrored ballroom survives intact. The palace houses the Deutsche Barockgalerie's 17th- and 18th-century German paintings, with a Baroque garden open to the public.

The Fuggerei is a walled housing settlement in Augsburg founded in 1516 by the banker Jakob Fugger the Younger for needy Catholic citizens of the city. Still inhabited today under the original conditions of residency, it is the oldest social housing complex still in use, with gated streets, small squares and a chapel inside its walls.

The Basilica of Saints Ulrich and Afra is a Gothic church in Augsburg's old town, built on the site of the Roman tomb of Saint Afra, martyred in 304. Its green onion-domed bell tower became a model for Baroque towers across Bavaria, and the Renaissance interior holds three large 16th-century altars.

The Augsburger Puppenkiste is a marionette theatre founded in 1948 in the former Heilig-Geist-Spital in Augsburg's old town. Its productions were broadcast nationwide as television series from 1953, including Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer and Urmel aus dem Eis; the adjoining puppet museum, 'Die Kiste', has displayed its marionettes and sets since 2001.

The Botanischer Garten Augsburg opened on its present 10-hectare site in 1936, next to Augsburg Zoo at the edge of the Siebentischwald forest. It holds more than 3,100 plant species and varieties, including a Japanese garden, a rose garden and glasshouses, with over a million bulb plants flowering each spring.

Augsburg Zoo opened on 12 June 1937 as the Park der deutschen Tierwelt on the edge of the Siebentischwald forest. Spread over 22 hectares next to the Botanical Garden, it keeps around 1,600 animals from some 300 species and takes part in European breeding programmes for endangered species.