A gleaming golden horseman presiding over the Alter Markt, this is a copy of Europe's oldest free standing equestrian statue, carved around 1240 and thought to portray Emperor Otto the Great.

Magdeburg's dignified Baroque town hall presides over the Alter Markt, its warm facade rising above the square where citizens have governed themselves for nearly eight centuries.

Magdeburg's oldest parish church, where Martin Luther once preached the Reformation into being, its twin towers a stubborn survivor of a thousand years of fire and war.

The oldest surviving building in Magdeburg, a serene Romanesque monastery whose stone cloisters and slender twin towers have watched over the Elbe city for nearly a thousand years. Today its vaulted halls hold one of the finest contemporary art collections in eastern Germany.

A riot of rose pink walls, tilting windows and golden towers, the Green Citadel is Friedensreich Hundertwasser's final architectural fantasy. Trees grow out of its windows and grass carpets its rooftops in the very heart of Magdeburg.

Rising above the Elbe with twin towers of weathered sandstone, Magdeburg Cathedral is the oldest Gothic church in all of Germany. Beneath its soaring vaults rests Otto the Great, the first Holy Roman Emperor, who chose this city as his beloved home.

A leafy, linden-lined walkway raised high above the Elbe, widely celebrated as the first public promenade in Germany. Medieval defensive towers still stand guard along its edge, gazing out over the river.

A long spine of ancient sandstone lurking in the Elbe below the cathedral, revealed only when the river runs low. This is the Domfelsen, the rock that gave Magdeburg both its firm footing and its very reason to exist.

Magdeburg's most beautiful surviving boulevard, a proud parade of ornate Gründerzeit townhouses whose stucco garlands and carved balconies escaped the firestorm that erased almost the entire old town.