2hrs Private Tour of Cologne

Two hours is not long, but in Cologne it is enough. The old town is compact, the cathedral is three minutes from the main station, and a good local guide can lay out two thousand years of the place between one and the next. This short private tour is the one to sell when your clients have a half day between trains, a gap before dinner, or a first afternoon they do not want to waste.

What the two hours cover

The tour centres on Cologne Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the longest building project in German history – begun in 1248, abandoned for three centuries with a crane left standing on the unfinished south tower, and completed in 1880. From there the route moves into the old town, past the coloured gabled houses of the Fischmarkt, the Romanesque church of Great St. Martin and the alleys behind it, and out onto the Rhine promenade with the Hohenzollern Bridge and its load of padlocks. The guide works in the Roman layer as they go: Cologne was Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium, a provincial capital, and the street plan still remembers it.

The format

• Two hours, private, on foot, with a licensed English-speaking guide
• Start time and meeting point set by your clients – hotel lobby, station or cathedral forecourt
• Route adjusted to interests: Roman, Gothic, postwar reconstruction or simply the best of it
• No admissions included; the cathedral itself is free to enter outside service times
• Extendable to three or four hours at short notice if the party is enjoying itself

Who it suits

It is the ideal format for clients on a river cruise with a short call, for travellers stopping in Cologne between Frankfurt and Amsterdam, and for anyone who wants orientation rather than exhaustion. Older guests appreciate that the distances are genuinely short. Families with children get more out of two well-guided hours than four unstructured ones. Because it is brief, it also works as an add-on to an afternoon of something else entirely, and it is the cheapest way we know of turning a dead half day in a transit city into something your clients will actually remember.

Extending the day

Follow the walk with a Rhine cruise along the Cologne waterfront, or with the chocolate and brewery modules in our wider Cologne tour programme. Guests staying downstream can reach the city on the Cologne excursion from Duesseldorf, and those with a full day to spend should consider the excursion to Bonn and the Siebengebirge. The city sits on the Cologne destination page. The tour runs year-round; the cathedral square is at its most crowded in high summer and at its best early in the morning.