Düsseldorf

The Altstadt is nicknamed the "longest bar in the world" because roughly 300 bars and restaurants are squeezed into less than a quarter of a square mile. The drink is Altbier, a copper-coloured, top-fermented beer served in a small 250 ml Becher glass; the waiter marks a pencil stroke on your beer mat for every round. Four taverns in the Old Town still brew it on site. Uerige, with its stained-glass windows and cavernous rooms, is one of the city's oldest, and Füchschen is the largest Altbier brewery in town. Between pints, the twisted spire of the Basilika St. Lambertus marks the oldest corner of the city, and the audio guides for the brewery houses and the basilica explain how a riverside market town became the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia.

A broad, tree-lined promenade runs along the river below the Old Town, and locals head here at sunset. Follow it south and the Rhine Tower takes over the skyline: 240 metres tall, with an observation deck at 164.5 metres and a restaurant one level above it offering 360-degree views. Just beyond lies the Medienhafen, the former harbour that has become a business district of media, fashion and finance firms. Its centrepiece is Frank Gehry's Neuer Zollhof, three riverside towers that seem to lean and ripple in different skins. The audio guides here trace the harbour's conversion from working docks to showcase architecture.

The Königsallee, or simply the "Kö", is a double-sided avenue with a canal running down the middle and a strip of parkland on either bank, lined with cafés and designer boutiques. It is Düsseldorf's luxury shopping street, but also one of its most elegant walks. At its northern end the boulevard opens into the Hofgarten, the city's central park, which ties the shopping district back to the Old Town and the museum quarter.

Düsseldorf's art credentials run deep. The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is split across two houses: K20, behind a polished black stone façade, holds twentieth-century work by Kandinsky, Matisse, Picasso and Klee alongside post-1945 American art, while K21 occupies a nineteenth-century building and shows international artists working after 1980. The Museum Kunstpalast spans the Middle Ages to the present, with German Expressionists, works by Rubens and one of Europe's finest glass collections. The Kunstakademie Düsseldorf trained Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke and Andreas Gursky, and its audio guide explains why this city, not Berlin, became the school of post-war German art.

Around 11,000 Japanese people live in the wider Düsseldorf area, the largest such community in Germany, with over 6,000 Japanese nationals in the city proper. Little Tokyo clusters along Immermannstraße, where ramen bars, bookshops and grocery stores sit a short walk from the main station. The connection is visible in the parks too: the Japanese Garden in Nord Park opened in 1975 as a gift to the city, and it is one of the quietest places in Düsseldorf to sit with an audio guide.

Two trips to the edges of the city reach back furthest in time. Schloss Benrath, in the south, is a pink Baroque pleasure palace built between 1755 and 1770 for Elector Charles Theodore by his architect Nicolas de Pigage, with a hunting park and two museums in its wings. In the north, Kaiserpfalz Kaiserswerth is the ruined imperial palace that Emperor Frederick Barbarossa fortified to watch traffic on the Rhine; the village around it, with its own riverside taverns, only became part of Düsseldorf in 1929.

The centre is walkable: Altstadt, Königsallee, Hofgarten and the museum quarter are all within fifteen minutes of each other on foot. The Rhine Tower and Medienhafen are a half-hour riverside stroll from the Old Town, and both Benrath and Kaiserswerth are reached by the city's U-Bahn and S-Bahn lines.