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Wuppertal
City in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Wuppertal

Wuppertal is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, in western Germany, with a population of 355,000.

Plan a trip to Wuppertal→From Dortmund

Wuppertal is the seventh-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia and 17th-largest in Germany. It was founded in 1929 by the merger of Elberfeld, Barmen, Ronsdorf, Cronenberg and Vohwinkel, and was initially called "Barmen-Elberfeld" before adopting its present name in 1930. It is the capital and largest city of the Bergisches Land.

Get in

Getting to Wuppertal

The closest airports to Wuppertal are either Düsseldorf airport or Cologne/Bonn airport. Lufthansa's (and by extension Germany's) main hub airport Frankfurt FRA IATA is worth considering when arriving from across an ocean as it is not that far away and well connected through the Frankfurt-Cologne high speed mainline.

  1. 01
    Wuppertal Hauptbahnhof

    Wuppertal is 30 minutes away from Cologne by regional train (RE/RB), with departures several times an hour.

See

Worth seeing

Wuppertal as a whole - as opposed to its constituent parts Barmen and Elberfeld - is probably best known for its pioneering urban transit system, the Schwebebahn which its designer Eugene Langen tried to sell around the world but had few takers outside Wuppertal. A much shorter route exists in Dresden and was also built during Langen's lifetime.

  1. 01
    Die Hardt

    A nice wide park on a hill in the heart of Wuppertal.

  2. 02
    Wuppertaler Zoo

    Hubertusallee 30 (S-Bahn "W-Zoologischer Garten" Schwebebahn stop "Zoo/Stadion"),.

  3. 03
    Historische Stadthalle Wuppertal

    Nowadays the Stadthalle is a concert hall, host to many cultural events.

  4. 04
    Engels Haus

    Friedrich Engels is perhaps one of Barmen's most famous sons.

  5. 05
    Museum für Frühindustrialisierung
  6. 06
    A performance by the Pina Bausch

    Since the late choreographer Pina Bausch (1940-2009) came from Wuppertal, her troupe often stops by in the city to show her work.

Do

Things to do

  1. 01
    Bergische Museumbahnen

    Kohlfurth district of Wuppertal (from Wuppertal take Bus CE64 to stop "Kohlfurther Brücke"), info@bmb-wuppertal.de.

  2. 02
    Open Ground Club
Eat

Where to eat

If you want to go out, then the Luisenviertel is probably a nice place to go. The Luisenviertel is part of the Old Town of Elberfeld and hosts a wide range of nice cafes and some restaurants. The most famous one is Katzengold.

  1. 01
    Katzengold

    Untergrünewalder Straße 3.

  2. 02
    Wuppertaler Brauhaus

    Try the Wuppertaler Brauhaus-Fritten and the spare ribs.

  3. 03
    Hayat-Jiyan Restaurant

    Schreinerstr.

Text adapted from Wikipedia and Wikivoyage, CC BY-SA 4.0. Photograph: Frank Vincentz (CC BY-SA 3.0), Wikimedia Commons.