Cologne Tours

Cologne is not a city that gives itself up on a coach tour. Almost everything visitors see was rebuilt after 1945, and the interest lies in how that rebuilding was done. These three private modules – a fifties architecture walk, the chocolate museum and a brewery circuit – can be booked singly or combined into a full day, and between them they cover the city’s design, its industry and its temperament.

Dynamic Cologne in the fifties

This guided walk is about reconstruction: how a destroyed city chose to handle its own history, and the often unrecognised elegance of its 1950s architecture. Where access allows, the tour goes inside the town hall or the Guerzenich – a fifteenth-century hall rebuilt after the war at great cost and with real care, whose stairways, balustrade and lamps are the point of the visit. The route also takes in the new town hall, the Domforum and the Blau-Gold-Haus, and the church of St. Johann Baptist, restored in the idiom of the decade. It is the tour for clients who like buildings and dislike crowds.

The Chocolate Museum

Founded and financed in 1993 by Hans Imhoff, then chairman of the old Cologne firm Stollwerck, the Schokoladenmuseum is now independent and unlike anything else of its kind. It stands on the Rheinauhafen peninsula on the left bank, directly in front of the old town and near the cathedral, looking from the promenade like a futuristic ship in glass and aluminium; visitors reach it across an old swing bridge. The guided visit runs about an hour and follows the bean from cult drink of the Maya to industrial bar, praline and figure.

The brewery tour

Koelsch es e Jefoehl – our way of life is a feeling. The circuit visits three breweries and tastes the differences between their Koelsch, the pale, strongly hopped, top-fermented beer that is also a dialect and a way of living. Your clients learn why the waiters are called Koebes, how carnival and Koelsch became inseparable, and the entirely serious case that Koelsch and Bordeaux have more in common than either side admits. The rooms themselves – long tables, standing room, no ceremony – say more about the city than any monument.

Building the day and adding to it

Any two modules make a comfortable day with lunch between them; all three works if your clients start early. Everything is private, with a licensed guide whose background is described under our professional tour guide service, and entrance fees are quoted separately from the guiding. Add the water with a Rhine cruise past the Cologne waterfront, or extend into the Ruhr with the full-day industrial heritage excursion. The city overview sits on the Cologne destination page and the rest of the range in our Cologne tour portfolio. Carnival week and the weeks before Christmas are the two periods to plan around rather than into.