Audio Guide Cochem

Cochem

Places researched in this city

A selection of the 13 places we've researched in this city. The full set is in the Parroo app.

• Medieval castle
• Baroque town hall
• Railway engineering
• Cold War bunker
• Riverside promenade

• 01

  Cochem Imperial Castle

  The castle was destroyed by French troops in 1689 and sat as a ruin for nearly two centuries before Berlin merchant Louis Ravené bought it in 1868 and rebuilt it in neo-Gothic style. Founded around the year 1000 and elevated to an imperial castle by King Conrad III in 1151, it stands more than 100 metres above the Moselle.

• 02

  Eltz Castle

  Unusually, Eltz Castle was never destroyed: it has stood on its 70-metre rock spur above the Elzbach stream continuously since it was first documented in 1157. When the Eltz family split into three branches in 1268, they divided the castle between them rather than fighting over it, creating a rare shared-ownership fortress known as a Ganerbenburg.

• 03

  Market Square with Town Hall

  During Cochem's annual Heimat- und Weinfest, wine flows directly from the Martinsbrunnen fountain in the square. The Baroque town hall behind it was built in 1739 on the site of a predecessor destroyed by French troops in 1689, commissioned by the Archbishop of Trier as an electoral office.

• 04

  Parish Church of St. Martin

  The late Gothic choir of St. Martin's survived the bombing raid of January 5, 1945 that levelled the nave and tower; architect Dominikus Böhm then rebuilt the church in the 1950s, weaving together the medieval survivor and a new structure topped with a Baroque onion dome. Stained glass by Graham Jones and Patrick Reyntiens fills the interior.

• 05

  Kaiser Wilhelm Tunnel

  Before this tunnel opened in 1879, trains between Koblenz and Trier had to follow the Moselle's loops for around 21 kilometres; the tunnel cut that stretch to 4.2 kilometres. Completed after five years of construction using traditional methods, its ornate portals are decorated with imperial eagle sculptures.

• 06

  Federal Bank Bunker Cochem

  For decades, locals knew there was something under the Moselle hillside but not what: a 1,500-square-metre facility, 30 metres underground, secretly built between 1962 and 1964 to store 15 billion Deutsche Mark in emergency currency, officially disguised as a staff training centre. It opened as a museum in 2016.

• 07

  Historic Mustard Mill

  The mill dates to 1810, but it spent most of the 20th century in Belgium and then the Netherlands before stopping entirely in 1993; entrepreneur Wolfgang Steffens tracked it down, brought it to Cochem, and reopened it as a working museum in 2001. Its 525-kilogram millstone still cold-grinds around 180 kilograms of mustard daily, including a Riesling variety.

• 08

  6 more places to discover

  In the Parroo app