Ulm Minster

For 135 years the openwork spire of Ulm Minster, 161.53 m high, was the tallest church tower on Earth; only in October 2025 did the still-unfinished Sagrada Família in Barcelona overtake it. The tower is built to be climbed: 768 steps lead to a gallery at 143 m, the last stretch a tight spiral barely wide enough for one person, and in clear weather the view runs over Ulm and Neu-Ulm on either side of the Danube to the chain of the Alps from Säntis to the Zugspitze.

The church was a civic project. Around 1377 the burghers of Ulm, then a town of about 10,000 people, decided to pay for a great church inside their own walls, and on 30 June that year Mayor Ludwig Krafft laid the foundation stone. Heinrich Parler drew the first plans for a hall church; from 1392 Ulrich Ensingen, who had worked at Strasbourg, raised the ambition to a towering nave and the highest spire in Christendom. The building was consecrated in 1405, but the ambition nearly broke it: the vaults pushed the pillars outward until Burkhart Engelberg, in the late 15th century, divided each aisle in two with an extra row of columns. The north wall still leans out by 27 cm. In 1530 the city voted for the Reformation and the Minster became Lutheran, which is why, despite its size, it has never been a cathedral. Work stopped in 1543 with the tower at about 100 m, resumed in 1844, and ended on 31 May 1890, the builders adding some ten metres to the medieval design.

Inside, the nave rises 41.6 m and the church stretches 123.56 m; it seats about 2,000 people today and is said to have held 20,000 standing in the Middle Ages. The high altar fell to the iconoclasts of the Reformation, but much else survived. The oak choir stalls carved by Jörg Syrlin the Elder in the 15th century, crowded with hundreds of carved busts, are among the most famous of the Gothic period; Hans Multscher's Man of Sorrows stands at the central west portal, and the apse keeps stained glass of the 14th and 15th centuries. The young Mozart played the organ in 1763. A statue of the prophet Jeremiah below the organ was paid for in 1877 by the city's Jewish congregation, among them Hermann Einstein, and Ernst Barlach's sculpture The Beggar is a 20th-century addition.

The tower dominates the Münsterplatz for a reason beyond its height. In the air raid of 17 December 1944 about 80 percent of Ulm's medieval centre was destroyed, yet the Minster came through almost unscathed, and a 500 kg bomb that fell into the choir in March 1945 failed to explode.

Getting there

The Minster stands on the Münsterplatz in the centre of Ulm. Ulm Hauptbahnhof, on the Stuttgart–Munich main line served by Intercity-Express trains, is about 700 m away on foot. The nearest airport is Memmingen (FMM), about 49 km to the south-east; Stuttgart Airport (STR) is about 65 km away.