Moving to Nuremberg

Federal agencies

Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF)

Both the Federal Employment Agency and the federal migration office are headquartered in Nuremberg, making the public sector one of the city's largest and most stable employers — and giving it an unusual concentration of policy and administrative work for a city this size.

Electrical engineering & rail

Siemens, Siemens Mobility, Diehl, Alstom (Nuremberg works)

Siemens has manufactured in Nuremberg for over a century and the city builds trains, drives and industrial automation. The engineering labour market here is deep, and less exposed to a single sector than Stuttgart's.

Medical technology & research (Erlangen)

Siemens Healthineers, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Universitätsklinikum Erlangen

Erlangen, twenty minutes north on the S-Bahn, is one of Europe's densest medical technology clusters, anchored by Siemens Healthineers and one of Germany's largest universities.

IT, financial services & market research

DATEV, Consorsbank, TeamBank, Nürnberger Versicherung, GfK

DATEV is one of Germany's largest IT service providers, a cooperative built to run the software of the country's tax advisers — an unglamorous, very large and very stable local employer.

Consumer brands, writing instruments & toys

Playmobil (Zirndorf), Faber-Castell (Stein), Staedtler, Schwan-Stabilo, NürnbergMesse

The region makes an improbable share of the world's pencils and toys, and NürnbergMesse runs the world's largest toy fair as well as BIOFACH and embedded world.

Sporting goods & precision components (Herzogenaurach)

adidas, Puma, Schaeffler

Two of the world's three largest sportswear companies were founded by feuding brothers in the same small town twenty kilometres west, and both still have their global headquarters there alongside Schaeffler's bearings business.

Landmark · Altstadt

The imperial castle on the sandstone ridge above the old town, with five kilometres of surviving medieval wall running round it.

Local tip: The Sinwellturm view is the classic one, but the free part is better: walk the wall and the dry moat, which is a continuous green ditch circling the old town that locals use as a park and almost no visitor walks all the way round.

Culture · Southeast, by the Dutzendteich

The Nazi party rally grounds, including the unfinished Congress Hall which now houses a documentation centre about them.

Local tip: The site is enormous and deliberately not tidied up — the Zeppelinfeld grandstand is crumbling and the debate about whether to conserve it is very much live. Take the S-Bahn to Dutzendteich and allow three hours. The documentation centre is excellent and unflinching.

Landmark · Justizpalast, west of the centre

The courtroom where the leadership of Nazi Germany was tried in 1945 and 1946 — still an operating Bavarian courtroom, with a museum on the floor above.

Local tip: Because it is a working court, access to the room itself depends on the day's sittings — check before travelling. Walk from there to the Street of Human Rights beside the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, where thirty elements — twenty-seven concrete pillars, two floor plates and an oak tree — each carry one article of the Universal Declaration in German and in a different second language.

Nature · Schmausenbuck, east of the city

A zoo laid out in a disused sandstone quarry and the surrounding forest, and one of the most beautiful in Europe for that reason.

Local tip: The quarry walls and pine woods do most of the design work, and the site is large enough that a visit is a walk in a forest that happens to contain animals. A season ticket costs little more than two visits and locals treat it as a park.

Neighborhood · Immediately west of the old town

'GoHo' — the multicultural district just outside the walls that has become the city's centre of gravity for bars, studios and independent shops.

Local tip: The stretch around Austraße and the Jamnitzerplatz is where most of the good small restaurants are, and it is where the city's nightlife has migrated from the tourist-facing Altstadt. Still genuinely mixed rather than finished, which is the point.

Food · Under the old town, and out into Franconia

Four storeys of rock-cut cellars beneath the castle hill, dug for brewing, later used as a bomb-proof art store — and the beer gardens above them.

Local tip: The cellars are cold, cut by hand into sandstone, and in the war they held the imperial regalia and Dürer's work while the city above burned. Then get on a train to Upper Franconia and drink Kellerbier at a brewery tap — the region has the highest brewery density on earth, and almost nobody who moves to Nuremberg is told this in the first year.