See more, experience more
Are you organizing a conference in Dessau-Roßlau, a family celebration or a class reunion?
How about an exclusive group tour for you. Individually plannable, flexible and informative. Get to know the history of the city in a comfortable atmosphere. We will be happy to advise you!
All offers can be booked at the Tourist Information Dessau. Please note that the guided tours are usually in German language. A surcharge for guided tours in English may apply. Please ask our staff about the possibility of guided tours in English.
City tour in your own bus. Bookable all year around.
Group price for groups up to 25 people: 140 €
Group price for groups over 25 people: 160 €
(surcharge for English guided tour: 20 € per hour)
approx. 2 hours
Bauhaus Buildings Tour
In Dessau, Walter Gropius built other modernist buildings in addition to the Bauhaus building and the Masters’ Houses. Visit the labor office designed by Gropius, the Törten settlement and the Kornhaus restaurant. Learn how the Bauhaus accommodated the needs of cities in the age of industrialization while still respecting history and the natural landscape.
Learn about the UNESCO World Heritage Site and probably one of the most famous parts of Dessau-Roßlau’s urban history.
Bauhaus Buildings Cycling Tour
On a guided cycle tour, you will explore all the Bauhaus buildings in the city – from the Kornhaus on the Elbe to the Masters’ Houses, the Bauhaus Building and the Historic Labour Office to the Törten estate in the south of the city.
During the tour you will learn lots of interesting facts about the history of the art academy, the architecture of the buildings and many an anecdote about the Bauhäusler.
Departure into Modernity
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 as the world’s first college of design. In 1925, it moved to Dessau. But why here in particular? We will get to the bottom of this question on this tour.
Get to know the Bauhaus and the Masters’ Houses as the initial buildings of modernism on this city tour. Learn more about Hugo Junkers and the industrialization of the region. Take a walk through the Georgium World Heritage Park and get to know the models of Bauhaus architecture there.
City Tour Invisible Places
The Bauhaus building in Dessau is considered an icon of modernism. But which places in Dessau beyond the Bauhaus buildings designed by Walter Gropius can still be associated with the Bauhaus? Where did the Bauhäusler work, where did they live, where did they celebrate in the city?
Our city tour shows you these invisible Bauhaus places and invites you to discover an unknown side of the Bauhaus.
Ise's Golden Twenties
Ise and Walter Gropius have an appointment for a soirée with Mayor Fritz Hesse. But Walter Gropius is not at the appointed place. In search of her husband, Ise Gropius therefore takes the visitors on a journey through nocturnal Dessau in the Golden Twenties.
Experience an exciting guided tour of the city in times gone by.
Round trip with own bus.
Including guided tour of the Luisium Park, guided tour of the Oranienbaum Park and guided tour of the Wörlitz Palace Gardens.
Group price 240 €
(group up to 25 persons, each additional person € 6)
approx. 6 hours
Garden Kingdom Tour
The Wörlitz parks are only the highlight of the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Kingdom. Other parks lead the visitor from Dessau to Wörlitz. Visit the Luisium, the romantic refuge of Princess Luise, and the English-Chinese garden in Oranienbaum. Experience the diversity of styles of the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Kingdom.
Bike rental available upon request
Group price 180 €
(group up to 15 people)
approx. 3 hours
Garden Kingdom Bike Tour
The landscape parks of the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Kingdom are best explored by bike. You will visit three of the gardens during our Garden Kingdom bike tour: the Luisium, the Georgium and the Großkühnau Park. You will ride through the natural floodplain landscape of the Elbe and also touch on the industrial history of the region.
Once Arcadia and Back
On an educational trip that took him through Italy, France, Holland and England, Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau collected impressions and experiences in the mid-18th century, which he implemented in the modernization of his principality.
On the walk through the Georgengarten you retrace this grand tour.
Embedded in the extensive idyllic landscape garden, you will see Greek temples, Roman ruins, Celtic tumuli and Egyptian sphinxes.
A Christmas Journey through Europe
Inspired by Prince Franz’s Grand Tour, you will take a walk through the Georgengarten on a journey through Christmas Europe. Franz and his princely tour group were on the road for two and a half years, during which time they visited Italy, France, Holland and England.
After their return, the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Kingdom was created, in which Prince Franz and his brother Johann Georg recreated their travel impressions in order to offer the common people the possibility of an educational journey through Europe. During a walk through the Garden Kingdom, they were thus able to get to know the buildings, living conditions and customs of other countries.
So you can travel to seven countries in seventy minutes, hear familiar and unfamiliar stories about their Christmas traditions, and learn the origins of many a custom.
Guided Tour Wörlitz Park
In the Wörlitz parks, five parts of the garden unite around Lake Wörlitz and its canals, which are united by bridges, ferries, paths and visual relations to form a total work of art. Experience the fusion of nature and education, art and economy during a walk.
Duration 60 minutes
Group price 60 €
Duration 90 minutes
Group price 90 €
Duration 120 minutes
Group price 120 €
(group up to 25 persons)
Surcharge English speaking tour: 20 € per hour
City Tour Downtown
Discover the eventful history of the city on a tour. Dessau has a history of eight hundred years, offers four times World Heritage and is a place where the lives of many famous people crossed.
The tour shows how the Bauhaus came to Dessau, what the city has to do with the Basic Law and why some of its children are better known abroad than in their birthplace. The tour brings urban spaces to life and contemporary witnesses from a wide variety of eras have their say, in order to unite the city of Father Franz and Erdmannsdorff, Moses Mendelssohn and Kurt Weill, Max and Wilhelm Müller, Junkers, Gropius, Kandinsky and many others into a picture full of contrasts.
Round trip with own bus without inside visits.
Group price for groups up to 25 people: 120 €
Group price for groups over 25 people: 140 €
Duration: 2 hours
Half-hour stops (each + 40 € / group):
- Park walk Georgium
- Kornhaus / Great Elbe Arch
- Federal Environmental Agency
- Naval Museum Roßlau
- Technology Museum “Hugo Junkers”
One-hour stops:
- Anhalt exhibition in the city museum: As part of the city tour you will visit the exhibition “Schauplatz vernünftiger Menschen” in the city palace “Johannbau” with a guided tour.
Group price: 7,50 € / person (at least 10 persons ) - Bauhaus guided tour: As part of the city tour you will visit the Bauhaus building on a guided tour.
Group price: 70 €, plus 5,50 € admission per person - Luisium Palace and Park: As part of the city tour you will visit the Luisium Palace and Park.
Group price: 7,50 € / person (from 10 persons) - Mosigkau Palace: After the city tour you will visit Mosigkau Palace, the only preserved rococo ensemble in Central Germany.
Group price: 7,50 € / person (from 10 persons)
City Tour Dessau
Our city tour takes you first to the historic center of the former residential city of Dessau with the city palace, the castle church and the market. You will visit the Bauhaus and the Masters’ Houses, architecture of classical modernism. Experience the landscape of the Elbe floodplain at the Kornhaus.
Get in the mood for the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Kingdom with the Georgium. And get to know the Federal Environment Agency, a building that harmoniously combines art, nature and technology.
City tour for school classes
What makes the Bauhaus so special? Who or what is “Auntie Ju”?
These and many other exciting questions will be answered on the discovery tour through Dessau’s city centre. The one-hour tour is orientated on the curriculum of 3rd and 4th grade local history and science lessons.
The tour is of course also suitable for family groups, children’s birthday parties or school trips.
The tower guard of St. Mary's Church
The tower guard is a talkative woman who misses nothing in the city. Dressed in a historical costume, she guides her guests through the old city center. She tells stories about the old Dessau.
The walk ends with a Dessau beer or an apple spritzer at the “boozer board” of the inn brewery “Zum Alten Dessauer”.
Romantic Walk
Experience Dessau in an unusual way – magical music, legends and stories between the palace, Kavalierstraße and the town hall can be heard on this tour of unusual places in the city center. The tour ends with a glass of sparkling wine at the Restaurant am Lustgarten.
Night Guards Tour
Follow one of the poorly paid guardians of order and security on his tour of the city and learn about the part of Dessau’s history that takes place in secret: Assassination and forbidden pleasures, secret love affairs and devilishly strange apparitions.
Guided Tour Federal Environmental Agency
When it was completed, it became a landmark: the Federal Environment Agency in Dessau. The architects succeeded in combining state-of-the-art low-energy construction with architecture that is as extraordinary as it is cheerful and light.
The one-hour guided tour explores the ecological model building and questions its ambitious goals. It also explains the location and working methods of the Federal Environment Agency. In an excursus, the prehistory of the area as a historic gas quarter and Hugo Junkers’ first workplace in Dessau is presented.
The 2-hour tour also takes in the Jewish cemetery
1,5 hours 90 €
2 hours 120 €
(group up to 25 people)
1,5 hours resp. 2 hours
Jewish life in Dessau
Over 350 years have passed from the beginnings of the first settlement of Jewish families in the former principality of Anhalt-Dessau to the present day. Famous personalities have worked in this Jewish community and beyond, enriching the cultural and economic life of our town.
With the construction of the new synagogue in the historic centre of the Jewish community, Dessau has regained an important religious and cultural site in its city history.
There are still a few historical places of Jewish life at the time of Kurt Weill, Moses Mendelssohn, David Fränkel, Baron Moritz von Cohn and Julie Cohn-Oppenheim to be discovered. Discover them on the city tour through Dessau city centre.