Where to Stay in Gießen, Hessen

What is Gießen known for?

The Mathematikum invites visitors to handle mathematics rather than read about it, and the Liebig Museum preserves a teaching laboratory in the rooms where the work was actually done. Monuments carry the same theme outdoors, the Liebigdenkmal and the Röntgendenkmal among them. Students fill the streets between.

Art and local history hold the rest, at the Kunsthalle Gießen and the Oberhessisches Museum.

What are the main landmarks in Gießen?

The Mathematikum draws the crowds. Giessen Old Castle and the Stadtkirche hold the oldest fabric, while the Oberhessisches Museum and the Kunsthalle Gießen divide the collections between local history and current work. Outdoors, the Giessen Art Trail spreads works across the built-up ground, while the Liebigdenkmal and the Röntgendenkmal keep their own corners.

The Drehhaus is the local curiosity, and the Watering Can Museum an odder one still. Pankratiuskapelle is the smallest of them.

What is the history of Gießen?

The record opens in 1152. Giessen Old Castle belongs to the centuries when holding ground meant building on it, and the Stadtkirche served the settlement that gathered around it. Pankratiuskapelle survives from the same long stretch.

Older evidence sits underground, at the Samian Ware Discovery Site, which records occupation that nothing standing in the streets above it can account for. The university changed the place. Teaching left buildings behind it, and the Liebig Museum keeps a working laboratory of the period intact, room by room, bench by bench.

The Liebigdenkmal and the Röntgendenkmal carry two of those names outdoors, where a town that made its name in laboratories could be seen to say so in public. Imperial Post Office Giessen dates the next phase, when public services outgrew the rooms they had started in. Parishes multiplied as the built-up ground spread, so that St. Michael, the Petruskirche and the Lukaskirche each ended up serving a quarter of their own.

The Drehhaus is the strangest survival. Gießen serves as the seat of its district and of the administrative region that carries its name. Kleinlinden sits apart from the middle with a church of its own, the Protestant church Kleinlinden.

Where is Gießen?

Hessen contains it. Gießen gives its name to both the district around it and the wider administrative region, which makes the town an administrative centre as much as a university one. The built-up ground is compact.

Kleinlinden lies out beyond it, far enough that the Protestant church Kleinlinden reads as a village church rather than a city parish. Walking covers most of the rest, from Giessen Old Castle to the Mathematikum.

What is the climate of Gießen?

Gießen sits inside the temperate band. That puts the outdoor half of the town, the Giessen Art Trail and the walk between the Liebigdenkmal and the Röntgendenkmal, firmly in the warmer months. Winter belongs to the collections.

The Mathematikum, the Liebig Museum and the Oberhessisches Museum absorb a wet afternoon between them, which is the practical reason a short stay here works in any season.

How do you get to Gießen?

Most arrivals come in from the road and rail network of Hessen, and the role of the town as the seat of its district and administrative region keeps those connections busier than the size of the place suggests. After that it is walking. Giessen Old Castle, the Stadtkirche, the Kunsthalle Gießen and the Mathematikum stand close enough together that no local transport is needed between them.

Kleinlinden and the Sporthalle Gießen-Ost sit outside that radius and need a bus or a car.