Sightseeing Tour Düsseldorf

Duesseldorf is a small city that behaves like a large one. It has a medieval old town packed with breweries, a boulevard of luxury boutiques, a riverfront rebuilt over a buried motorway, one of Europe’s most influential art academies and the largest Japanese community in Germany – all within about two square kilometres. A private walking tour is by some distance the best way to make sense of that combination.

The Altstadt

The old town is known as the longest bar in the world, and the nickname is nearly literal: several hundred pubs, brewhouses and bars in a handful of streets. By day it is a different place – lively squares, the traditional brewhouses serving dark, top-fermented Altbier straight from the wooden barrel, the historic Rathaus with the equestrian statue of Jan Wellem in front of it, and the church of St. Lambertus with its famously twisted spire, warped by unseasoned timber and explained locally by a rather better story involving the devil.

The river and the boulevard

The Rheinuferpromenade is Duesseldorf’s best piece of civic engineering: the riverside road was put in a tunnel and the space above it given back as a wide promenade of cafes and plane trees, with the river traffic passing in front. From there the walk turns inland to the Koenigsallee – the Koe – a boulevard built along an old moat, with water and trees down the middle and the luxury houses along the eastern side.

Art, fashion and the avant-garde

Your guide brings in the strand that makes this city more than pleasant: the art academy where Joseph Beuys taught, the photographers who came out of it and changed how the world takes pictures of buildings, and the fashion trade that still runs the city’s showrooms. The Japanese quarter around Immermannstrasse, with its bookshops, bakeries and restaurants, is a short and worthwhile detour for guests who enjoy the unexpected, and it produces some of the best casual lunches in the city. None of this is obvious from a guidebook, which is precisely why the walk is worth guiding rather than printing.

Format, season and what to add

The tour is private, taken at a relaxed pace, and shaped around whichever of those threads your clients care about; guides are licensed and work in English as standard, as described under our tour guide service. It runs year-round, is genuinely good in the rain because the distances are short, and is at its best in late spring on the promenade. Add the Duesseldorf shopping tour for the afternoon, the evening in the old town after dark, or a day out to Cologne with a private car and guide. The city overview is on the Duesseldorf destination page.