Opening hours, prices and tickets for places worth your time.
Auerbachs Keller is Leipzig's second-oldest restaurant, with a wine bar recorded on the site as early as 1438. It occupies five historic dining rooms beneath the Mädler Passage arcade and owes its fame to Goethe's play Faust, where Mephistopheles first takes Faust drinking here.
St. Thomas Church is a late-Gothic Lutheran hall church in central Leipzig, home to the Thomanerchor boys' choir founded around 1212. Johann Sebastian Bach served as its music director from 1723 until his death in 1750 and is buried inside. Allied bombing damaged the church in 1943.
The Gewandhaus is Leipzig's concert hall and home of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. The current building, the third to carry the name, opened on Augustusplatz in 1981 to a design by architect Rudolf Skoda and seats 1,900 people. In 1989 it hosted public talks on reforming East Germany.
MUNCH is the museum of the painter Edvard Munch, who left his works to the City of Oslo. It opened in 1963 at Tøyen and moved in 2021 to a 13-storey tower in Bjørvika designed by estudio Herreros. Its galleries show paintings, prints and drawings from the collection, including versions of The Scream, alongside temporary exhibitions.
The Oslo Opera House in Bjørvika, designed by Snøhetta and opened in 2008, is the home of the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet. Its sloping roof, clad in white Carrara marble and granite, rises from the fjord and can be walked up to the top; the glass foyer is open by day, and the main auditorium seats 1,364.
Akershus Fortress is a medieval stronghold on a headland above the Oslofjord, begun at the end of the 13th century under King Haakon V and rebuilt as a Renaissance residence under Christian IV. Its ramparts and grounds are open to walk, and within the walls stand Akershus Castle, the Armed Forces Museum and Norway's Resistance Museum.
The Norwegian Maritime Museum stands on the shore at Bygdøynes, next to the Fram and Kon-Tiki museums, in brick buildings opened in 1958 and 1960. Founded in 1914 and known until 2010 as Norsk Sjøfartsmuseum, it covers Norwegian shipping, coastal life and marine archaeology, with traditional boats, ship models, maritime paintings and finds from wrecks.
The Fram Museum on the Bygdøy peninsula opened in 1936 around the polar ship Fram, built by Colin Archer for Fridtjof Nansen and later sailed by Otto Sverdrup and Roald Amundsen. Visitors can go aboard and below deck; a second hall holds Gjøa, the first ship to sail through the Northwest Passage, with exhibitions on Arctic and Antarctic expeditions.
Norway's Resistance Museum occupies the Double Battery, a building from about 1691 at Akershus Fortress. Opened by Crown Prince Harald in May 1970, it follows the German occupation of Norway from the invasion of 9 April 1940 to the liberation in May 1945 in a chronological display of weapons, radio sets, sabotage equipment, documents, photographs and models.
The Kon-Tiki Museum on Bygdøynes holds the vessels of Thor Heyerdahl's expeditions: the balsa raft Kon-Tiki, on which he sailed from Peru to Polynesia in 1947, and the reed boat Ra II, which crossed the Atlantic from Morocco in 1970. Opened in 1949, it also shows finds from Easter Island and a whale shark model beneath the raft.
The Astrup Fearnley Museum is a private museum of contemporary art, founded in 1993 and housed since 2012 in two buildings by Renzo Piano on Tjuvholmen, set on either side of a canal under a curved glass roof. One building shows changing exhibitions, the other a rotating selection from the Astrup Fearnley Collection, with works by Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Damien Hirst.
Oslo Cathedral was built in 1694–1697 as Our Saviour's Church on Stortorvet and is the seat of the Bishop of Oslo and the church of the royal family and parliament. Inside are a Baroque altarpiece and pulpit from around 1700, stained-glass windows by Emanuel Vigeland and a ceiling painted by Hugo Lous Mohr between 1936 and 1950.
Oslo City Hall, the red-brick seat of the city council by the harbour, was built from 1931 to 1950 to designs by Arnstein Arneberg and Magnus Poulsson, with a pause during the Second World War. Its two towers rise 63 and 66 metres; inside, murals by Henrik Sørensen and Alf Rolfsen cover the main hall, where the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded each December.
The Nobel Peace Center is the museum of the Nobel Peace Prize, opened in 2005 in the former Oslo West railway station on the City Hall Square. Its exhibitions present Alfred Nobel, the peace laureates since 1901 and themes of war, peace and dialogue, and each December a new exhibition about that year's laureate opens.
The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design holds the Norwegian state's collections of art and design, formed in 2003 from five museums including the National Gallery. Its building at Vestbanen by the harbour opened in 2022; the galleries run from older art and crafts to contemporary works and include Edvard Munch's 1893 painting The Scream.
Norsk Folkemuseum on Bygdøy is a museum of cultural history whose open-air section holds more than 150 buildings moved from towns and rural districts across Norway. Among them are Gol Stave Church, dated to around 1200, a Setesdal farmstead, a Sámi site and an old town quarter; indoor exhibitions cover folk dress, folk art and Sámi culture.
The Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo stands at Tøyen inside the University Botanical Garden, which was founded in 1814. Its stone exhibition buildings from the early 20th century show Norwegian and foreign wildlife, minerals and fossils, including the 47-million-year-old primate fossil known as Ida, while the garden holds around 7,500 plant species.
Oscarshall is a neo-Gothic summer palace above the Frognerkilen inlet on Bygdøy, built from 1847 to 1852 by the Danish architect Johan Henrik Nebelong for King Oscar I and Queen Joséphine. Norwegian artists of the period, among them Adolph Tidemand and Hans Gude, decorated its rooms, and the restored romantic park runs down to the water.
The Royal Palace is the official residence of the Norwegian monarch, completed in 1849 at the top of Karl Johans gate to designs by Hans Linstow. Visitors see the Neoclassical facade, the equestrian statue of Charles XIV John on the Palace Square and the changing of the guard, and walk in the Palace Park; the interior opens only for guided tours in summer.
The Monument to the Battle of the Nations commemorates the 1813 defeat of Napoleon's army by the Russian, Prussian, Austrian and Swedish coalition at Leipzig. Completed in 1913 for the battle's centenary, the 91-metre monument has over 500 steps to a viewing platform and houses the Forum 1813 museum at its base.
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