Passau Self-Guided Walking Tour with Audio and Quiz

The hilltop fortress founded in 1219 by the prince-bishops of Passau, on the Georgsberg ridge across the Danube. Seen from the waterfront below, it shows how the bishops held the heights while the citizens traded down by the river.

Paul stands where Passau's medieval city gate once marked the edge of the walled town, on a line of defences going back to Roman times. Rebuilt in Baroque style on a narrow cliff-edge site, it fits its sacristy into the old gate structure.

Passau's cathedral, rebuilt in Italian-influenced Baroque by architect Carlo Lurago after the city fire of 1662, with a surviving late-Gothic east end. It houses one of the largest church organ installations in the world, including a distant organ hidden in the attic.

At its centre the Wittelsbacher fountain carries allegorical figures of the city's three rivers, the Danube, the Inn and the Ilz.

Passau's Gothic town hall on the Danube bank, assembled over time from a group of existing patrician houses rather than built as one. Painted flood marks on its tower record how high the river has risen over the centuries.

A medieval abbey in the lower old town, long one of the most powerful institutions in the bishopric. It is the burial place of Gisela of Bavaria, wife of Stephen I of Hungary, who is said to have ended her life here as abbess.

A round tower of about 1250 standing on a rock directly in the Inn, once guarding the river traffic and serving as a mooring point for salt barges. Because it stood detached over the water, its medieval timber roof escaped the city fires of the 17th century.

The tip of the peninsula where the Danube, the Inn and the Ilz come together. The three rivers arrive with visibly different colours, the Inn often milky green from Alpine sediment and the Ilz dark from the forest peat.