Lübeck travel guide

Top 10 sights in Lübeck

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© W. Bulach · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Holstentor

   A twin-towered brick gate of 1478 on the western edge of the old town, the only one of Lübeck's four city gates left. It has sunk unevenly into the marshy ground so that the towers lean visibly towards each other; it appeared on the fifty-mark note and now holds a museum.

   TiqetsKlook
2. 

   2© Carsten Steger · CC BY-SA 4.0

   St. Mary's Church Lübeck

   The church of Lübeck's merchant families, built between 1250 and 1350 and the model for about seventy brick Gothic churches around the Baltic. It has the tallest brick vault in the world at 38.5 metres; the bells smashed in the 1942 air raid were left where they fell.

   TiqetsKlook
3. 

   3© 1970gemini · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Lübeck Cathedral

   A brick cathedral begun in 1173 by Henry the Lion as the seat of the Lübeck bishopric, and the earliest large brick church in the Baltic. Bombing on Palm Sunday 1942 brought down the vaults and burned the Arp Schnitger organ; the 1477 triumphal cross by Bernt Notke survived.

   TiqetsKlook
4. 

   4© Debauchery · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Burgtor

   The northern gate of Lübeck, built in 1444 in late Gothic brick and one of only two of the city's gates to survive. Its baroque helm roof was added in 1685.

   TiqetsKlook
5. 

   5© Carsten Steger · CC BY-SA 4.0

   St. Peter's Church (Lübeck)

   A five-aisled hall church first recorded in 1170 and completed in the 15th century, burnt out in the raid of 1942 and not fully restored until 1987. It keeps no congregation now, serving for concerts and exhibitions; a lift climbs the tower for the view over the old town.

   TiqetsKlook
6. 

   6© Carsten Steger · CC BY-SA 4.0

   St. Jakobi

   One of the five main Lutheran churches of the old town, consecrated in 1334, and the church of Lübeck's sailors and fishermen. A lifeboat from the barque Pamir, which sank in 1957 with eighty men lost, stands inside as a memorial.

   TiqetsKlook
7. 

   7© BS Hochschulstadtteil (Diskussion) 20:27, 11. Jun. 2015 (CEST) · CC BY 4.0

   Europäisches Hansemuseum

   A museum of the Hanseatic League opened in May 2015, at 7,405 square metres the largest devoted to the subject, built over the excavated remains of the medieval town and a Dominican priory. The League's trading network ran from Novgorod to London for four centuries.

   TiqetsKlook
8. 

   8© TheaterFiguren · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Lübeck Museum of Theatre Puppets

   A museum of puppetry in Lübeck holding several thousand hand, rod and shadow figures from Europe, Asia and Africa, built on one collector's lifetime of acquisition. It occupies a row of small old houses near the cathedral.

   TiqetsKlook
9. 

   9© Concord · CC BY-SA 3.0

   St. Anne's Museum Quarter

   A former Augustinian nunnery of 1502 that has held the city art museum since 1915, with the largest collection of medieval sculpture and carved altarpieces in Germany, Memling's Passion altar among them. Upper rooms show merchant interiors from the Middle Ages to the 19th century.

   TiqetsKlook
10. 

    10© Photo: Andreas Praefcke · CC BY 3.0

    St. Catherine's Church

    A Brick Gothic church built in the early 14th century for the Franciscans and taken from them by the city's Reformation ordinance of 1531. It keeps no congregation now and serves as a museum church; Ernst Barlach and Gerhard Marcks carved the figures standing in its west front niches.

    TiqetsKlook

Popular tickets & tours in Lübeck

Live products and prices are provided directly by Klook.

KlookOpen Lübeck activitiesBrowse tickets & toursKKdayOpen Lübeck activitiesBrowse tickets & tours

Trending now

Based on 2025 Wikipedia pageviews — popular places beyond the top 10.

1. 

   1© Carsten Steger · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Saint Giles church (Lübeck)

   A Gothic brick church of the thirteenth century, the smallest and easternmost of the old town's five main churches, in what was the craftsmen's quarter. Its baroque organ and painted wooden gallery survive.

   TiqetsKlook
2. 

   2© Olaf Malzahn · CC BY-SA 3.0 de

   Willy Brandt House

   A museum in Lübeck to Willy Brandt, born here in 1913, who became chancellor of West Germany and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 for his opening to eastern Europe. His kneeling at the Warsaw ghetto memorial in 1970 is the exhibition's central image.

   TiqetsKlook
3. 

   3© 1970gemini · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Museum Behnhaus Drägerhaus

   An art museum in two joined merchant houses of the 1780s, part of the World Heritage site, holding nineteenth and twentieth-century German painting. Its Munch, Kirchner and Nolde holdings are the strongest part; the neoclassical rooms are kept as interiors.

   TiqetsKlook
4. 

   4© Heinrich Wiechell · CC BY 3.0

   Bucu

   The hill island between the Trave and the Wakenitz on which Lübeck's old town stands, and the name of the Slavic castle that occupied it before the German town. Its ramparts are gone; the name survives in local usage.

   TiqetsKlook
5. 

   5© Klaus Kegebein · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Sacred Heart Church

   The principal Catholic church of Lübeck, built in the early twentieth century for a minority in a Lutheran city. Three of the four Lübeck martyrs — priests executed in Hamburg in 1943 for opposing the Nazis — served here.

   TiqetsKlook
6. 

   6© 1970gemini · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Brahms-Institut

   A research institute in an eighteenth-century merchant's house that acquired the largest private collection of Brahms manuscripts, first editions and letters in 1990. Brahms's own working papers can be consulted there and are shown in rotation.

   TiqetsKlook
7. 

   7© Genet · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Ahrensbök Charterhouse

   A Carthusian charterhouse at Ahrensbök in Holstein, founded in the fifteenth century and dissolved at the Reformation. Its buildings later served as a ducal residence; fragments remain in the village.

   TiqetsKlook
8. 

   8© Kresspahl · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Reinfeld Abbey

   A Cistercian abbey at Reinfeld near Bad Oldesloe, founded in 1186, which drained and farmed much of this marshy region and grew wealthy on its fish ponds. It was dissolved in the Reformation and demolished; the ponds and the site remain.

   TiqetsKlook