For roughly forty-five years after the war, the middle of Dresden’s Neumarkt was a heap of blackened sandstone, and everyone who walked past it knew what it had been: the Frauenkirche, which survived the firestorm of 13–14 February 1945 and then collapsed on the morning of the 15th. The church has been standing again since its reconsecration in 2005, and the darker stones salvaged from the rubble are still visible in its pale new walls, like a seam where the repair was made.
That seam is the thread this walk follows. Most of what you’ll pass between Brühl’s Terrace and the Frauenkirche was wrecked in 1945 and rebuilt over the following decades, some of it only in the 1980s and 1990s, so the useful question at each stop is how much of what you’re looking at is original, what stood there before, and who decided it was worth putting back. Dresden is my favourite city in Germany for exactly this reason: it is old and new at once, and it makes no attempt to hide the join. Berlin, Munich and Cologne get most of the attention, and Dresden gets a quick stop on the way to somewhere else.
The route of our Self-Guided Walking Tour starts at the eastern end of Brühl’s Terrace and runs west along the Elbe to Schlossplatz and Theaterplatz, loops through the Zwinger and around the Residenzschloss, and finishes at the Frauenkirche, with the Fürstenzug and the Stallhof on the way. It stays outside the museums, so it takes an easy day on foot; add the interiors and plan on two. Begin in the morning, when the terrace is quiet and you can get your bearings before deciding where to spend the afternoon, and finish around Neumarkt, where there is plenty to eat.
Start at Georg-Treu-Platz, at the eastern end of the terrace beside the Albertinum, and walk west along the river. The terrace began as part of Dresden’s 16th-century fortifications, and it took on its present character in the 1740s, when Count Heinrich von Brühl, the powerful minister of Augustus III, turned the ramparts into a terraced garden for his palace; the architect Johann Christoph Knöffel laid out the garden from 1739. It stayed private until 1814, when the Russian military governor, Prince Repnin-Volkonsky, whose troops were occupying Dresden after Saxony’s defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, ordered it opened to the public. Gottlob Friedrich Thormeyer then built the monumental staircase at the western end that you’ll come down at the end of this stretch. The nickname “Balcony of Europe” is usually credited to Goethe.
Almost nothing from Brühl’s own time survives. The buildings along the terrace today are mostly late 19th and early 20th century, and two of them replaced Brühl’s palace and library outright.
From the edge of the garden, you can look out over the Elbe River and across to what is now called Neue Town. The King of Saxony, Augustus II, gave this plot of land to his cabinet master, the Earl of Brühl. Brühl employed the famous landscape architect Johann Christoph Knöffel to create a public garden for the people to go alongside the magnificent ramparts of the terrace.
The Albertinum is the sandstone building at the eastern end, and its core is older than the terrace’s reputation: it began in 1559–63 as an arsenal. In 1884–87 the regional master builder Carl Adolf Canzler extended and converted it in the Renaissance Revival style to house the royal sculpture collection, and it was named for King Albert, who was on the throne at the time. It came through the 1945 bombing in better shape than most of its neighbours, was restored by 1953, and became a refuge for art during the war, including the contents of the Green Vault. After the Elbe flood of 2002 it was renovated again, with a watertight depot slung above the inner courtyard, and it reopened in 2010.
Inside, the Galerie Neue Meister and the Skulpturensammlung from 1800 cover art from Romanticism to the present. It is open Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00–17:00 (admission €14). In front of the building, the small Brühl’s Garden sits on a former bastion, one of the surviving pieces of the medieval fortifications.
Walk west to the building with the glass dome, which is the Lipsiusbau, built in 1887–94 by Constantin Lipsius in the Neo-Renaissance style for the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the Saxon art society. Locals call the dome the Zitronenpresse, the lemon squeezer, a nickname that has lasted because it’s accurate. The gilded figure on top is Fama, the personification of fame (the Greek Pheme), which is a reasonable thing to put on a building full of art students.
The complex was badly damaged in 1945. Its exhibition wing stood unused until reconstruction in the early 2000s, completed in 2005, and it now serves as the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau, run by the Dresden State Art Collections; it is closed at the moment, so check before planning around it.
A little further on, the Münzgasse lane below the terrace opens a view onto the Frauenkirche. Make a note of it, since you’ll be standing at the church’s doors by the end of the day.
The Sekundogenitur, with the turquoise copper roof, was built in 1897 for the second-born son of the ruling family (the name is the word for that arrangement), and it replaced Brühl’s library, which once held more than 60,000 volumes. The Ständehaus beside it was built in the first years of the 20th century as the Saxon parliament, on the site of Brühl’s palace, and today it houses a court. Its spire complements the palace tower and the spire of the Hofkirche, both of which you’re about to see up close. Take Thormeyer’s staircase down from here to Schlossplatz.
Schlossplatz is the open space where the terrace staircase, the Hofkirche, the bridge and the Residenzschloss meet, and it takes its name from the palace, whose Georgentor opens onto it.
The Saxon Ständehaus is the former Parliament building. It is now the headquarters of the High Regional Court of Dresden and the State Office for Monument Preservation of Saxony.
The Georgentor is the monumental entrance to the Georgenbau, the central section of the palace, and the Georgenbau is regarded as an early landmark of German Renaissance architecture. The old Elbe gate on this spot was converted into the Georgentor in 1530–35, and the version you’re looking at is the neo-Renaissance rebuild of the 1890s and 1900s.
The facade of the building is covered in the religious subject matter. The figures of life and death guard the entrance and above them the motto “Per invidia Diaboli Mors Intravit In Orbs” (through the devil’s envy death entered into the world) is etched into the stone.
You’ll come back to the palace later in the route; for now the two things to look at are the bridge and the cathedral.
Look north across the Elbe, because there has been a crossing at this spot for the best part of a thousand years. The Meissen chronicle records the first bridge over the river in Dresden for the year 1070, the first stone arch bridge is documented in 1287, and the medieval bridge was for a time the longest in Germany. Augustus the Strong replaced it with a new sandstone bridge in 1727–31, and that one was torn down in 1907 because its many narrow arches were a hazard for river traffic. The bridge you’ll cross today opened in 1910, designed by Wilhelm Kreis and the engineer Hermann Klette, and it is reinforced concrete faced in sandstone, with nine wide arches where the old bridge had many narrow ones. It was renamed Augustusbrücke again in 1990.
Carriage rides have run from the square in the past, and as cheesy as they are, the rebuilt streets are the setting that suits them best (worth checking whether they’re operating when you visit).
The Hofkirche, now Dresden’s Catholic cathedral, explains something that surprises many visitors: why a city in the heartland of Lutheranism has an enormous Catholic church at its centre. Augustus the Strong converted to Catholicism in 1697 to qualify for the Polish crown, and his son Augustus III (Frederick Augustus II) commissioned the church from the Italian architect Gaetano Chiaveri, who built it between 1739 and 1755. The plans had to be kept strictly confidential, since Saxony was Protestant. The Lutheran Frauenkirche, a city parish church begun in 1726, was going up at almost the same time, so Dresden ended up with two huge churches of different faiths within about a dozen years of each other, one for the city and one for the court.
The cathedral is the largest church in Saxony, with a floor plan of nearly 4,800 square metres, and it is Dresden’s youngest Baroque building. Its balustrades and niches carry 78 stone figures of apostles, saints and church dignitaries, each about 3.5 metres tall, by the sculptor Lorenzo Mattielli. The restaurant across the street, the Italienisches Dörfchen, is named for the Italian craftsmen who worked on the church. Beneath it, the crypt holds 49 sarcophagi of Wettin princes and kings and their relatives, along with the heart of Augustus the Strong, whose body was buried in Kraków. The building was badly damaged in 1945 and has been restored, and it has been the cathedral of the Dresden-Meissen diocese since 1980. Inside, the pulpit by Permoser, the altarpiece by Mengs and the Silbermann organ are the things to look for. Entry is usually free, though opening hours vary, so confirm them locally if the crypt is your priority.
From the Hofkirche it’s a few steps onto Theaterplatz, named for the Hoftheater, the court theatre that became the Semperoper, and arguably the best place in the city to see how many architectural styles can share one square. The Baroque cathedral, the Renaissance palace, the Zwinger’s Baroque galleries, Semper’s Neo-Renaissance opera and Schinkel’s Neoclassical guardhouse are all in view at once, and none of them looks like it was consulted about the others.
The bronze equestrian statue in the middle of the square is of King Johann, who reigned from 1854 to 1873. Johannes Schilling modelled it and it was unveiled in 1889. Johann was a serious man of letters: under the pseudonym Philalethes he produced a verse translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, begun while he was still a prince, and that’s why a relief portrait of Dante sits on the plinth beneath the Saxon crown. The statue faces an opera house that was reportedly rebuilt on his initiative, so the placement is deliberate.
The Semperoper is the building everyone photographs, and it has been built three times. Gottfried Semper designed the first court theatre, which opened in 1841 and saw a run of premieres by Richard Wagner, who arrived in Dresden the following year. It burned down in 1869. Dresden’s citizens demanded that Semper rebuild it, even though he was in exile for his part in the 1849 uprising, and the second house, built between 1871 and 1878 under his son Manfred’s supervision from Gottfried’s plans, is the one that matters for the opera’s reputation: under the conductor Ernst von Schuch, it staged the world premieres of Richard Strauss’s Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier.
That building was almost completely destroyed on 13–14 February 1945, the same night as the rest of the old town. After the fire in 1869 the citizens had it rebuilt within a decade; after 1945 it took forty years. The opera reopened on 13 February 1985, forty years to the day after its destruction, with Weber’s Der Freischütz, the last work performed before the war closed the theatres. The 1985 building is a near-exact copy of Manfred Semper’s, with modern stage machinery and a new service building at the back. The Elbe flood of 2002 damaged it again, and it reopened in December of that year. Look up at the panther-drawn quadriga over the entrance, which is by Schilling, the sculptor of King Johann’s statue.
The small Neoclassical building at the edge of the square is the Schinkelwache, the old city guardhouse, designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and built in 1830–32 in the form of an Ionic temple. It was rebuilt in 1995 and now holds a caf,Cafe Schinkelwache, with a terrace, which makes it a sensible place to stop for coffee or a light lunch before the Zwinger, though it’s worth checking opening hours when you arrive.
Enter the Zwinger from the Theaterplatz side and give yourself some time in the courtyard, because this is one of those historic buildings so thoroughly absorbed into the city that it’s hard to picture Dresden without it. It is also not treated as a monument by the people who live here: they cut through it on the way to work, eat lunch by the fountains, jog the arcades and sneak off for a midnight kiss.
The word Zwinger refers to the zone between the inner and outer walls of a fortress, and this complex was built on Dresden’s former fortifications, part of whose outer wall survives. It started life in 1709 as a temporary wooden festival ground put up for the visit of the Danish king, and the same year Augustus the Strong commissioned the architect Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann to build an orangery for his collection of southern plants. The result, built between 1710 and 1728 with the sculptor Balthasar Permoser, served as an orangery, an exhibition gallery and a stage for court festivals. The original plans were larger than what was built, and the Elbe side stayed open until Gottfried Semper’s gallery closed it in 1847–55; that wing, the Semperbau, now holds the Old Masters.
The style is late Baroque, often labelled Rococo, and the design is built around movement: curving galleries, pavilions crowded with sculpture, and ornament that looks as if it’s still growing. The pavilion at the high point of the composition, the Wallpavillon, is topped with a statue of Hercules, usually read as a reference to Augustus himself. The Glockenspielpavillon, which began as the Stadtpavillon, now holds a carillon of 40 Meissen porcelain bells installed in the 1920s and 30s, which is a modern addition to a Baroque building and chimes at intervals. Meissen is the porcelain town about 25 kilometres down the Elbe, where the factory opened in 1710.
The Zwinger was completely destroyed in the bombing of 1945 and was one of the first major buildings in the city to be rebuilt. Wandering the courtyard and the outer galleries is free. Inside, three collections share the complex: the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, which includes Raphael’s Sistine Madonna; the Porzellansammlung, with its Asian and Meissen porcelain; and the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, whose clocks, globes and scientific instruments are quietly the best argument for going in. One ticket at €18 covers all of them, but the galleries are closed on Mondays and the porcelain collection is shut for building works until 30 October 2026.
The Glockenspiel Pavilion southeast of the Zwinger is topped by a sculpture of Hercules. Hercules, holding the globe on his shoulders, is meant to reference Augustus 1st. The Glockenspiel building features a collection of porcelain bells made by the famous Meissen porcelain factory. The carillon of bells plays a melody every 15 minutes. The songs depend on the seasons and include Vivaldi, Mozart, and Bach pieces. Meissen was a town only about 25 km from Dresden. It created some of the finest quality porcelain outside of Asia. It was the first European porcelain factory when it opened in 1710. Exit through the Glockenspiel gates to continue on tour.
Leave the Zwinger on the Glockenspiel side and you’re at the Residenzschloss, for centuries the seat of the Wettin rulers of Saxony. The castle is first documented in 1289, the Hausmannsturm dates from around 1400, and Duke Albrecht the Bold made it his residence in 1485, so what you see is a patchwork of centuries rather than a single design. A fire in 1701 destroyed much of it, particularly the Georgenbau, which Augustus the Strong rebuilt, and between 1889 and 1901 it was given an extensive neo-Renaissance makeover for the 800th anniversary of the Wettin dynasty. The 1945 bombing left it a ruin, and reconstruction began in 1985 and ran for more than thirty years.
The courtyard walls are decorated in sgraffito, the technique of scratching through a layer of plaster to reveal a contrasting colour underneath, and much of it has been reconstructed. Today the palace is a museum complex rather than a residence: the New and Historic Green Vaults, the Kupferstich-Kabinett (prints, drawings and photographs), the Münzkabinett (coins) and the Rüstkammer (armoury), which includes the Turkish Chamber. The Historic Green Vault, the baroque treasury, is the one that requires a timed ticket, and the Hausmannsturm tower is open to visitors until 2 November this year (see Before You Go for prices and closing days).
Across the street from the palace is the Taschenbergpalais, which Augustus the Strong commissioned in 1705 as a city palace for his mistress, Anna Constantia, Countess of Cosel. It is still a slightly startling idea that the king’s mistress was given a house within sight of the royal residence, though the arrangement didn’t last: the court felt she interfered too much in politics, particularly Polish politics, and she wasn’t there long. The cream facade, frilly white window frames and terracotta roof look like a beautiful dress.
The palace stood in ruins for nearly fifty years after the war. Reconstruction began in 1993, and on 31 March 1995 it opened as the Kempinski hotel, Saxony’s first five-star property, at a reported cost of €127.8 million. It was renovated again and reopened in February 2024.
Walk along Taschenberg and turn north up Schloßstraße. At the end of Schloßstraße, you’ll reach the Fürstenzug or the Procession of Princes, a mural about 102 metres long showing 35 rulers of the House of Wettin on horseback, from Konrad the Great, who ruled from 1127 to 1156, to Friedrich August III, Saxony’s last king, who reigned until 1918, accompanied by soldiers, scholars and craftsmen on foot (nearly eight centuries of one dynasty, which is a respectable run by any standard). The name of each ruler is inscribed below his figure, and the artist, Wilhelm Walther, painted himself in at the end of the line.
The mural started life in 1871–76 as sgraffito, made to mark the 800th anniversary of the Wettin dynasty, and it replaced a procession painted in limewash almost three centuries earlier. The sgraffito didn’t stand up to Dresden’s weather, and between 1904 and 1907 the whole composition was transferred onto Meissen porcelain tiles (about 23,000 by one count and 25,000 by others), which makes it the largest porcelain artwork in the world. It came through the 1945 bombing with relatively minor damage, which is more than most of the street can say.
The Stallhof, the courtyard of the palace stables, opens off the same stretch of Augustusstraße. In Advent it hosts a medieval-themed Christmas market, while the main Striezelmarkt is on the Altmarkt. From here, continue east along Augustusstraße until the street opens out into the Neumarkt.
The Neumarkt is the square around the Frauenkirche, and the city treats the quarter around the church as the historic heart of Dresden. It is also the most tourist-heavy stretch of the route, so be selective about lunch: look for a regional menu in a place that has been in the same spot for a long time, and skip the “Canadian steakhouses” and the gelato shops that could be anywhere in Europe.
The Frauenkirche, the Church of Our Lady, is a Lutheran church designed by George Bähr and built between 1726 and 1743. Its stone dome, nicknamed the “stone bell” for its profile, rises over a square floor plan and weighs more than 12,000 tonnes, and it was the most recognizable shape in the city for two centuries. The church survived the first night of the bombing, the firestorm of 13–14 February 1945, and then collapsed at about ten o’clock on the morning of the 15th, after the fires inside had weakened the columns. Two sections of the side walls were all that remained standing.
What happened next is the reason the church matters beyond its architecture. Dresdeners began salvaging and numbering the stones soon after the war, and the East German authorities left the rubble where it was as an anti-war monument, and from the early 1980s thousands of people gathered there each February to light candles. The decision to rebuild was taken in 1985, and in 1989 a group of fourteen enthusiasts led by the Dresden musician Ludwig Güttler formed a citizens’ initiative to raise the money. Reconstruction began in 1993 with an archaeological excavation of the rubble, in which the stones were photographed, catalogued and sorted so that as many as possible could go back in their original positions, and the church was reconsecrated on 30 October 2005. The total cost is usually given as around €180 million, roughly two-thirds of it from donations, though the figure varies with what’s counted.
You can see the result on the exterior. The reused stones are noticeably darker than the new sandstone around them, blackened by fire and weathering, and the contrast will fade as the new stone ages. Counts of how many original stones were reused vary widely between sources, from about 3,500 to about 8,400 depending on how they’re counted, so treat any single number with some suspicion; the colour is a better guide than the statistics.
Entry to the church interior is by donation and the hours vary with services and concerts, so check the calendar. From inside the dome’s lantern you can look down into the nave through glass and up at the paintings of the inner dome. The climb is separate: the viewing platform is at a height of 67 metres, the route circles the outer dome two and a half times, and the dome is open Monday to Saturday 10:00–18:00 and Sunday 13:00–18:00, closing at 16:00 from November to February (the price is worth confirming on the church’s site).
From the platform you can pick out the glass dome of the Academy of Fine Arts and the long line of Brühl’s Terrace, which is where you started, and the Neumarkt directly below, where the rubble used to be.
By the time you come down from the Frauenkirche you will have walked past a fortress turned garden, an arsenal turned museum, an opera house built three times and a palace that took more than thirty years to put back, and very little of it is as old as it looks. That is the point of the route rather than a flaw in it. The stones in the Frauenkirche’s walls are darker where they came out of the rubble and paler where they were cut new, and the same seam runs through the whole old town: in the Semperoper, which reopened forty years after it burned, in the Taschenbergpalais, which stood as a ruin for nearly fifty, and in a castle that was rebuilt wing by wing over three decades.
From here, we end our tour. Dresden is truly a city of magnificent resurgence. Exploring it on foot is the perfect way to get in touch with so many different aspects of the old, the new and the restored.
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