Private Duesseldorf Tours and Rhineland Days

Forty kilometres from Cologne, and not the same city

Advisors routinely sell Cologne and Duesseldorf as one stop. They are 40 kilometres apart, the regional train takes about half an hour, and almost everything else about them differs. Duesseldorf is the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia, which Cologne, roughly twice the size, has never accepted. Cologne is a cathedral and pilgrimage city; Duesseldorf is an electoral court that became a banking, fashion and advertising town. Cologne drinks Koelsch, Duesseldorf drinks Alt, and each will cheerfully claim not to stock the other. The rivalry is played up for visitors and is also perfectly genuine. Sold properly it is two distinct days. Sold as one night with a bit of each, it is a coach ride with two lunches in it, and we say so before it is quoted.

The Koe, the Altstadt and the longest bar in the world

The Koenigsallee, universally the Koe, runs for about a kilometre along both banks of an old moat canal under plane and chestnut trees: banks on one side, the international luxury houses on the other. It takes twenty minutes to walk.

The Altstadt behind it packs a few hundred bars, brewhouses and restaurants into roughly half a square kilometre, which is why it calls itself the longest bar in the world. Altbier is the local drink: dark copper, top-fermented, poured into a 0.25-litre cylinder and replaced on the same running tally as in Cologne. Uerige, Fuechschen, Schumacher and Schluessel still brew on the premises, and those four are the ones worth the walk.

Art, and the academy behind it

The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen holds two buildings. K20 on the Grabbeplatz was founded around a purchase of eighty-eight works by Paul Klee and grew into a first-rank twentieth-century collection. K21, in the former state parliament under its glass dome, takes everything from about 1980 onwards.

Behind all of it sits the Kunstakademie, which is the real reason curators and photographers come. Joseph Beuys taught here, Gerhard Richter after him, and the class run by Bernd and Hilla Becher produced Andreas Gursky, Candida Hoefer and Thomas Struth. For a client with a serious interest in post-war art, Duesseldorf is a stronger day than Cologne, and almost nobody sells it that way.

The river, the harbour and the tower

The best thing the city did in the last forty years was bury the main road along the Rhine in a tunnel in 1993 and lay a promenade on top of it. On a warm evening the Rheinuferpromenade between the Altstadt and the harbour is where the whole city is.

At its southern end the MedienHafen is a working coal and timber harbour converted into offices and studios, with Frank Gehry’s three leaning buildings of 1999 at the centre of it. The Rheinturm beside it is 240 metres, with a viewing level and a revolving restaurant.

Little Tokyo, and the days outside the ring

Duesseldorf has one of the largest Japanese communities in Europe, built up around the trading houses that settled here after the war. Immermannstraße near the main station is the visible part: ramen counters, a Japanese bookshop and a supermarket, and enough of a community that the Japan Day on the Rhine each spring draws an enormous crowd and ends in fireworks.

Outside the ring, three easy half-days. Benrath Palace to the south is a pink Rococo maison de plaisance of the 1770s with a park and lakes. Kaiserswerth to the north puts the ruins of Barbarossa’s imperial palace on the riverbank, in the village where Florence Nightingale trained as a nurse in 1850. And the Neandertal valley, twenty kilometres east, is where the type specimen was found in 1856; the museum on the site is considerably better than clients expect.

Trade fairs, the airport and when to send clients

This is the operational point and it belongs in every quote. Messe Duesseldorf runs some of the largest trade fairs in the world — drupa, K, MEDICA, boot — and while they are on, room rates across the whole Rhine-Ruhr region rise by a multiple and availability disappears, Cologne included. We check the fair calendar before confirming anything, and would rather move a date by four days than sell a room at fair rates.

Duesseldorf Airport is among the busiest in Germany, takes long-haul traffic and has a station under the terminal that reaches the main station in about ten minutes, which usually makes it the better arrival for a Rhineland programme than Frankfurt. May to September is the season, Carnival empties the offices here as thoroughly as in Cologne, and Advent brings a scatter of small markets across the centre.