WHAT MAKES BREMEN SO SPECIAL? | Bremen Germany Travel Guide | Best Things to Do in Bremen

Bremen’s Best Sights: Exploring Bremen’s Historic Landmarks, Neighborhoods and More!

Moin from the Hanseatic City of Bremen, Germany! 🇩🇪✨

Join us for a Bremen tour and walking tour of this Hanseatic city, exploring its history and architecture. We visit the Bremen musicians statue, as well as many other sites. This Bremen travel guide highlights the best of this German city, so come walking with us!

We’ll begin with he stunning UNESCO World Heritage Town Hall and the lively Marktplatz (market square) before admiring Bremen’s most famous residents—the Town Musicians of Bremen. 🐴🐶🐱🐓

From there, we’ll wander through a peaceful park with a historic windmill, stroll down what many call the most beautiful street in Bremen, and explore the Schnoor district—a fairytale-like neighborhood of narrow lanes and colorful houses that miraculously survived World War II. Just steps away from the St. Petri Dom, we’ll show you the spitting stone, a quirky but meaningful piece of Bremen’s history that most visitors walk right past.

Bremen is full of history, legends, charm, and character, and it’s a must-see city when visiting Germany. Whether you’re planning a Bremen day trip from Hamburg or Hanover, traveling through northern Germany, or just love exploring unique European cities, this video will give you plenty of inspiration and travel tips.

So come along with us—let’s explore Bremen together!

👉 If you enjoy this video, please give it a thumbs up, subscribe to our channel, and leave us a comment.

Video Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:07 Marktplatz (Market Square)
03:51 Bremen City Musicians
05:27 Böttcherstraße
07:56 Snoor District
10:10 Tourist Information Walking Tour Review
12:38 Schlachte (Waterfront Area)
14:15 Windmill am Wall
15:14 Das Viertel (Hip Neighborhood)
16:17 St. Petri Dom
20:05 The Spitting Stone (Das Spuckstein)
21:35 Outro

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Welcome to Breman Mo from the Hanziatic city of Bremen. In this video, we’ll take you to some of the most beautiful and fascinating sites in northern Germany. We’ll start with Breman’s most famous residents, the town musicians, before admiring the stunning UNESCO World Heritage Town Hall and its lively marketplace. Just steps away, we’ll stop at the Spitting Stone, a curious reminder of Breman’s past. From there, we’ll wander through a peaceful park with a historic windmill, and stroll down what many call the city’s most beautiful street. We’ll explore the Schnore Quarter, a charming neighborhood of narrow lanes and colorful houses that miraculously survived World War II. Brimman is a city full of history, legends, and character, and we’re excited to share it with you. So, join us and let’s explore Brimman together. Okay, so Brimman was uh was received severe damage during World War II. I read that like 80 to 85% of the buildings in the inner city core were uh either completely destroyed or damaged. So, it’s pretty um amazing when you think about it. This this whole the main marked plots, the main town square was uh pretty much completely damaged except for the town hall, this beautiful building was not destroyed. And that guy over there, Roland, which uh symbolizes Breman’s independence um and that and therefore um it’s a it’s a city state. It doesn’t belong to any other state in Germany. So Roland is a symbol of uh independence, kind of freedom from any other governments, I guess. And that guy, he’s been he’s been on this square since 1406 or a version of him. So he’s been destroyed a couple times. The original one was Wood. He’s been destroyed four times, but uh he was not destroyed during World War II. So he’s been there. And so um the uh Roland and the town hall together those were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. Um and it’s a beautiful building. I mean it’s really uh intricate. It’s it was originally built in the 1400s. It’s been u added on to and different construction has been made to it, but it hasn’t been destroyed. So it’s it’s the original building. So really beautiful day here in Bremen on the mark plots. We’ve got these beautiful buildings here. We’ve got good old Roland. We’ve got the town hall. And we’ve got St. Peter’s Dome, the church right over there. [Music] All right. So, here we are on the Breman Market Square, the Mart plats, and uh just a beautiful day here in early August. And I’ve got a Beex unfiltered, which I’ve never seen before. I’ve never had this before, but it’s quite tasty. You can see it’s a little hazy, not clear like normally uh Beex is. And we’ve got a organ player and I’m looking at Roland and we’ve got the rat house and the the cathedral and it’s just a really beautiful nice day. Great way to spend the day here in Bremen in northern Germany. Mo [Music] Right behind me, this interesting statue is uh known as the Bremen City Musicians. And this is a fairy tale that was collected by the Brothers Grim. But it’s one of those that I don’t think ever made it to uh North America because I never heard it before I came to Germany. But the story is you’ve got a donkey, a dog, a cat, and a rooster all on top of each other. And the story goes that the donkey was old and tired and he couldn’t work in the fields of the farm anymore. So his farmer had uh started stopped feeding him. They never quite made it to this city. But anyway, that’s the symbol of Bremen and you see them all over, but this is like the most famous one right by the rat house. And you’re supposed to grab the donkey by the legs, the the front legs, both of them, and and rub them. Um, and apparently if you only rub one, then you are the donkey or the ass yourself, I guess. So, that’s the story of the Breman City Musicians here. And good. And I’m going to try to get some more music out of the um the Brimman City Musicians. We tried the other day. It wasn’t working. We were told that uh they because they received a lot of rain and often times and they get a lot of storms that the the thing doesn’t work, but it’s supposed to work whenever you put a a coin in. So, I’m going to try. We’ll see. If not, it all goes to charity, I guess, it goes to a good cause. But we’ll see if it works. All right. So, I’m in this little courtyard here in Butcher Bocher Butcher Strasa. And forgive my pronunciation. We’ve got the tourist information office right there. Very friendly in there. They spoke great English, very helpful. Gave us a map, told us some places to eat. We signed up for a walking tour in there that we’re going to take later today. Um, and this is like one of the cutest streets in Breman. Probably the cutest street in Bremen. Really nice. But right above there, we’ve got some M bells on at 12:00. This whole square is going to be full cuz people are going to be watching the bells. They play a little tune. And I believe from now from the 1 of April until the end of the year on the hour from noon until 6 PM they play every hour and people gather around to listen to the bells chime and uh this whole thing is going to be full that there’s there’s also a little thing that spins around somewhere. We’re going to get some video of it when it actually does it, but we wanted to talk about it when it’s not full. Um there’s actually like a little thing and it it kind of turns around and shows different images with the um with the bells. Now the M bells, if you don’t know, M is a city just right outside of not far from Dresden. And they produce porcelain. I believe they were the first producers of porcelain in all of Europe and it’s really nice, really expensive. And so those bells, if they’re M bells, they’ve got to be very, very valuable. There’s some very similar in Leipig which uh were very expensive to install. All right, so we’ll be here at noon and we’ll watch the bells go off here on stressa in front of the um tourist information office. [Music] Right. So, we are on along the Pcher Strasa, one of the cutest streets in Germany. And uh right in front of the the Bremer Bon Bon U manufacturer. They’re making candy in there. It looks really good. But there’s a little depiction of the Bremer City Musicians here. But the chicken, the rooster, or as they call it, the is stolen. And it says they have a little plaque there that says the is such such an object of desire that it gets stolen again and again. So finally it was stolen so many times they just didn’t replace it. So now there’s just a little outline of the rooster there. [Music] Welcome to the Schnore district. Breman’s oldest and most enchanting neighborhood. Its name comes from the low German word for string because rope and cable makers once worked here. But the real magic isn’t in the name. It’s in the streets. These twisting little lanes are so narrow that in some places you can stretch out your arms and actually touch both sides. Add in the crooked half-timbered houses, many more than 500 years old, and you’ve got a scene straight out of a fairy tale. What makes the Schnore even more amazing is that it survived the bombings of World War II almost completely untouched. While much of Brmond was reduced to rubble, this quirky little district stayed just as it was. A colorful slice of history frozen in time. Today, it’s filled with cafes, artisan shops, and plenty of surprises around every corner. The Shnore isn’t just a place to visit. It’s a place to get lost, wander, and feel like you’ve stepped into another world. So, it’s kind of nice. And we are in the Schnure area which is the oldest area of Bremen. And it wasn’t um uh it wasn’t damaged in World War II. One of the few parts of the city that wasn’t damaged in World War II. So it’s pretty much original buildings from the 15th, the 16th, and the 17th centuries if I’m not mistaken. And we just met a very interesting young man. He was a carpenter dressed in traditional um carpenter clothing. and he’s traveling around. He said the tradition is that you travel for one year and one day three years and one day and then you come back home. So he goes around looking to meet people looking for work and things like that. So we got a picture with him. I thought that was really cool. But yeah, the Schnore is a very nice uh area quarter here in uh Bremen. Lots of old buildings, lots of cute shops and stuff like that. And it’s definitely a place that you want to visit when you are in Bremen. [Music] All right. So, we’re here on the the Butcher Strasa right outside the tourist information office. And we went in there the other day. Uh very friendly, very helpful. I gave us some uh dining recommendations and they gave us this nice map that has key points of interest and a little bit of description about them on there on the back. Um, we also signed up for a walking tour in there, which was €12.50 per person, which isn’t bad. We took the walking tour, and honestly, it wasn’t great. Um, I really probably wouldn’t recommend it because, um, she wasn’t super friendly, and she didn’t give us a lot of information that we didn’t know already just by reading up on Bman before we got here. So, um, I really don’t think the tour was worth it. But the one thing she did tell us that was good to know was that um and maybe she’s trying to get us to leave the tour. I don’t know. But if you get the map and uh the points of interest on the tourist map and then you leave the tourist information office, you can follow the street and all through Bremen, they have these little silver dots and if you ever get lost and don’t know where you’re at, if you follow a silver dot, it’ll lead you to one of these points of interest on the map. So, if you’re looking for something, you don’t know where you’re at, find the dots and eventually you’ll run into one of these spots, points of interest that you’re looking for on the map. So, that was a good piece of information. Other than that, we didn’t really learn anything at all from the tour. So, normally we always take we like to take free walking tours because free walking tours um uh the idea is that you go on the tour, you don’t pay anything, and then when it’s over, you pay the guide what you think it was worth, right? So, you tip them and uh you know, we we usually pay 10 to 15 euro per person uh based on how good it was. And normally they’re pretty good. Normally, they are very good and I would say the free walking tours are generally better certainly better than what we uh paid for the other day. Um we were looking for those in Bremen and we wanted to do one. I couldn’t find one. All the ones I could find were all in Spanish. So, I guess there’s a lot of Spanish visitors in Bremen and maybe not so many English visitors cuz I could not find a free walking tour in English in Bremen. So, then we went to the tourist information office and just uh took the tour that they were offering. [Music] All right. So if you leave, if you come down the Bush Strasa, follow the silver dots, you’ll go underneath the set of stairs and come out here and you can come to the um the waterfront. Uh this is what they call the Schlacter uh the waterfront. This is on the river Vaser. Now I’ve heard people from Bremen pronounce it Vaser. Uh but it has an R at the end, so I want to call it Vaser. I’m not really sure how you really say it. Um but so this was the harbor of Bremen to a uh up to a certain extent. And then I guess it got uh maybe too crowded, too too too shallow, too small. So they about a few kilometers down the river they built Bremer Havin which is the port of Bremen now as as we know it. And so you got Bremer Havin which is officially a part of the state of Bremen. Now Bremen is um one of three city states in Germany. The other two being Hamburg and Berlin. Uh Bremen. So Bremen is the smallest um state in Germany. Bremer Havin down the river, the port is actually part of the state of Bremen. And uh so this is just a nice place to come for a walk along the riverside along the water. That old boat right there that says Alexander Humbot premavven um that used to be a boat that used to ship used to sail um around the world, I guess. I’m not sure where all it went. Uh but then at some point it got too small so they brought it here. Now it’s there. Now it’s a nice bar restaurant. You can go there and have a drink, have something to eat sitting along the waterfront here in Breman. [Music] Okay. So we are at the u the moola um f one of five old um uh mills from Bremen that have been preserved. We haven’t seen the other four, but this one is very close to the city center, but it used to be along the old uh fortifications of the city of Bremen um from the 17th century. Uh now it’s been preserved. It’s got a nice cafe there and the walls were taken down. Now there’s just a beautiful park. So as you’re going into or coming out of the actual city center of Brimman, nice place. There’s some beautiful trails along here to bicycle uh ride or just to go for a walk along the uh the water. Nice place, nice cafe, supposed to have some really nice food. We haven’t actually been there yet. Uh but it’s supposed to be really nice, but it’s really beautiful. Nice uh photo spot. You can go across the water and take a nice photo looking back this way of the mill, but it’s a really nice place here in Bremen. [Music] All right. So, we are in the section of Bremen called Das Ferto, which means the quarter or the neighborhood. And this is kind of a hip and trendy area of the city, just a little bit outside of the of the center. Lots of cool cafes and ice cream shops and bars and restaurants and stuff like that. That’s okay. And uh yeah, so Dash Verto is just a really cool looking uh you know trendy looking maybe you might say hipster neighborhood here in Bremen, but it looks really cool. It reminds me um some of um Sutat in uh Leipzig when we lived there a few years ago. So it reminds me of the street we call the Carly in Leipig. So real cool little neighborhood here in Bremen Das Ferto. [Music] I’m standing outside of the church of St. Peter here in Braymond. And uh on this spot, there’s been a church in this spot since 789. It was first consecrated. Um and then it was been destroyed by fires a couple times. the the church kind of as we see it right now was completed in the 1400s and it’s received some damage and rebuilt. It was severely damaged in World War II. All except the central nave. So the central nave inside is pretty much original from the 1400s, but it’s had it’s gone under different transformations, different design, different uh decorations, if you will. The two outer naves were or the outer nays were were destroyed. windows have been rebuilt since the war. But in the interior, the central nave is pretty much original uh century centuries old. Beautiful building. We’re going to step inside and show you what it looks like inside. So, we just took you inside the St. Peter’s Dome, the dome of St. Petri. Um, beautiful church, beautiful building. I talked kind of talked about the history of it a little bit. The central nave is really beautiful. Has a really nice organ and they’re playing some organ music in there, which is really nice. Now, on Saturdays during the summertime, they have organ concerts. Um, we’ll put the time on the screen. I can’t remember the time, but uh I think that would be really nice to go listen to. They have a uh a tower. You can climb the tower 60 m high. It costs €4 to go to go up. Um, normally I’m a sucker for climbing towers, but uh not feeling the best today. And what we’ve seen, uh, the views are all kind of, um, um, hindered a little bit behind a screen, so you can’t get perfectly clear views. So, we opted not to go up, but it does look nice. But, if you want to get photos and videos and things like that, you’re going to have some screen in between you. So, we decided not to not to go up. But, uh, beautiful church on the inside. Free to get in. Doesn’t cost anything. There’s also a museum inside, which is also free. It’s behind a little extra door. or you don’t have to pay anything to go into the museum. Um, so really cool. Lots of cool stuff in here. There’s a clock from 1671, I think. It’s just laying on the ground. So, obviously, it was damaged um somehow. Um, and there’s like the um the plans for how they built the the clock right next to it. So, that’s pretty interesting as well. They uh of note. So, one thing the the the church of St. Peter now supposedly St. Peter um had a key. He’s always depicted with a key sometimes two keys. Uh supposedly St. Peter had the key to heaven and he had the key to hell. Um so you so in Bremen the u uh the image of the city you’ll find you’ll find keys images of keys everywhere representing the city of Bremen and also St. Peter and Beck’s beer which is a huge uh brewery here here in Bremen. Uh their symbol is also a key from the city of Bremen. So, if you go inside, one of the stained glass windows is St. Peter holding a key, holding the key of Bremen, uh the key of Beex, the key to heaven or to hell. We don’t know which one, but the color is funny because it’s a greenish color. Uh like a bottle of um of Beex is in the green bottle. And uh from what we were told, Becks paid to have that um that window installed in the color of their beer. So maybe you look at that, you get thirsty, come outside and you buy a beck. I don’t know. That’s what we were told. But anyway, very beautiful church here in Bremen, the dome of St. Peters. [Music] Okay. Right behind St. Peter’s Church here in Brmond. If you walk back behind it a little bit, you you if you look on the ground, you might notice four dark cobblestones that make a square. Um, this marks the last public execution in Bremen and eerie story. It was a a serial killer, a a female serial killer. And this lady went on a rampage. She killed her family. She poisoned her family. She would like it seemed like she was caring for people, but she was actually poison them. cuz she killed her husband, her kids. Later she killed her fianceé. She’d been giving all these people rat poisoning and killing them. Fled. She fled. She fled to Hanover. And so a couple more people and killed a couple more few more people in Hanover. And then eventually they caught her and brought her back here to Breman and she was beheaded here on this spot. And it was the last public execution here in Breman. And it was in the 1800s I believe. Um so yeah. So interesting story. For those of you who are into studying serial killers, you can come to Brimman and uh study that one. I can’t I forget the lady’s name. We’ll put it on the screen. It’s called the spitting stone. So, and then so for years and years uh people would walk by and they’d spit on the stone cuz where that lady was killed. And still today, I guess some braman uh bremaners uh will actually spit on the stone as they walk by. [Music] But, uh, it’s been a great time here in Bremen and, uh, we will be heading home tomorrow. So, thanks for joining us. Hope you had a good time and hope you like this video from Bremen. If you did, please give it a thumbs up. Uh, leave us a comment. Let us know what your favorite part of Bremen is, what your favorite thing to do is here. And, um, yeah, and think about subscribing if you’re if you haven’t subscribed to us yet. Uh, and, um, join us next week and see where we’re at. All right. So good evening from uh Brandon.