Stuttgart – little known places and attractions

Not only historic monuments - little known places in Stuttgart are also worth seeing! Extraordinary museums, ground breaking architecture, or perhaps slow shopping? You are not going to get bored there!

In the city centre, at the wide and very busy Konrad Adenauer Strasse, you will find two very important art museums – the monumental edifice of the Art Museum, and the City Gallery, a state-of-the-art post-modernistic building treated a bit like an architectural joke, which employs peculiar transitions and colours. Those cultural attractions of Stuttgart are certainly worth your attention.

Near Schillerplatz, you will find a perfect place for food shopping - a modern market hall built in 1914 with countless stalls offering local products and delicacies from all over the world. If you are a gourmet, you will find it very hard to just walk past it! The more so as all the products are beautifully exposed. So, let's go shopping!

In the first half of the 19th century, local ruler Wilhelm I of Württemberg decided to have a vast park created in the city. Named Rosensteinpark, it is today the largest English-style park in south-western Germany. Go there to have a rest away from the loud metropolis, and admire the beautiful greenery. Also pop into the wonderful palm house and interesting Museum of Natural History, which is housed in the ruler's elegant summer palace built between 1822 and 1830. One park, so many attractions!

The Weissenhof Estate is among Stuttgart's attractions that are visited only by architecture lovers. Shame, because that extraordinary place helps understand the evolution in residential housing that took place in the interwar period. Built for the 1927 Werkbund Exhibition, the Weissenhof Estate was designed to represent the model and modern architecture of the German South. Invited to co-create it were several design stars of that time, including famous Le Corbusierem and Mies van den Roche, who later became the director of the project and author of its urban planning concept. Visit the site and see the experiment that was to set new trends in residential housing of the 20th century, solve the problems related with overcrowding and lack of green areas in cities, and tackle the issue of high building costs. Unfortunately, only some of the houses have survived to this day, but the project's modernistic layout and concept are there at your fingertips.

Cars and modern houses – the capital of Baden-Württemberg boasts a number of innovative projects and world breakthroughs. But there is something else. Among relatively little known places in Stuttgart is the Fernsehturm TV tower built in 1956, also a pioneer in its category of buildings. The 216 metres tall structure was built from reinforced concrete, a material never before used in buildings of this type. And it boasts one other innovation - it was here that the world's first restaurant and viewpoint were opened to the public, giving rise to the trend in other cities. In the mid 20th century, lunch or dinner with a panoramic view of the city made such an enormous impression on guests that other TV towers followed suit and started offering such attractions as well. 

There are not only TV towers in Stuttgart. Between 1869 and 1934, a number of the so-called Bismarck Towers were built across Germany. As the name suggests, they were to commemorate the prominent politician and author of the unification of the country. The fashion came also to Stuttgart, where a simple, albeit characteristic, Bismarckturm was built in 1904 in the city's attractive neighbourhood situated on a gentle slope in the outskirts. It offers a pleasant view of the city. A lot of such structures were also raised in eastern areas of Germany, now on the territory of Poland. Sadly, most of them did not survive to this day.

Discover less obvious historic monuments in Germany and book flights to Stuttgart!