Nuremberg before sunrise, an hour between buses

At around 5 a.m., I stepped out of Nuremberg bus station with one hour before my connection and an old town close enough to make sitting still seem unreasonable. Most doors were closed, the pavements were nearly empty and, apart from a few other strangers, I had this part of the city almost to myself.

The unusual connection was a consequence of saving money. On the way home from the Brazil trip, flying to Frankfurt and continuing by bus had roughly halved the airfare compared with flying directly to Prague. Nuremberg was the less elegant part of that calculation, but it gave me an unexpected walk before sunrise.

The weather was about 20.7°C, partly cloudy and dry. Frauentorturm appeared almost immediately, marking the entrance towards the historic centre. From there I continued along Königstraße and passed the medieval St. Klara church.

An hour in the dark

Frauentorturm and St. Klara on the approach into the old town, with Nuremberg still largely asleep.

A few minutes farther on, the architecture became more concentrated around Lorenzer Platz. Nassauer Haus stood opposite St. Lorenz, its sandstone walls catching the early light. It is the only surviving Romanesque tower house of its kind in Nuremberg. The pair of sundials on the corner were an easy detail to miss from a distance, but considerably harder to ignore once I was standing below them.

Across the square, St. Lorenz dominated the view. The large medieval Gothic church is difficult to fit neatly into a wide photograph from close range, which is probably part of the point. At this hour there were no crowds around the west facade, only construction barriers and the first light behind the towers. Up close, the sculpted portal was almost a separate subject in itself.

I wandered one more nearby street before turning back towards the bus connection. Restaurants were shut, tables were empty, bicycles were parked, and an advertising column stood in the middle of the otherwise quiet street.

This was not a planned visit to Nuremberg, and one hour is obviously not enough to see the city properly. It was enough, however, to turn an inconvenient bus change into a compact walk through the old town. At five in the morning, with almost nobody around, central Nuremberg briefly felt almost private.