Historic Rock-Cut Cellars

About this place

Under the castle hill runs a network of chambers cut straight into the coloured sandstone, first documented in thirteen eighty. Nurembergers had been driving shafts and cellars into the rock since the fourteenth century for two entirely practical reasons: to bring water into the city, and to mature and store the city's red beer at a temperature the surface could never hold. What survives is the largest cellar labyrinth in southern Germany, dropping through four levels beneath the streets. The second history here is a harder one. From October nineteen forty the beer cellars were converted into public air-raid shelters, and from nineteen forty-three they were joined to one another by connecting galleries up to forty metres long, meant as escape routes if fires raged above or the entrances were buried; six further emergency exits were cut into the city moat. On the night of the second of January nineteen forty-five, the raid that erased the old town in about an hour, a system built for fifteen to twenty thousand people is thought to have sheltered thirty-five to forty thousand. You can only go down with a guide. Tours leave from the brewery shop on Bergstrasse and last about an hour. It is cold and damp below all year round, so take a jacket; there are a great many steps and no wheelchair access. The Altstadthof brewery still uses a small part of the tunnels to mature its beer and spirits, and the tour ends at a point where you can taste what is made under your feet.