When Nuremberg laid out its Hauptmarkt and turned the Heilsbronn abbey bread house into a town hall from 1332, it put the prison in the basement. The result is the oldest part of the Rathaus and one of the largest surviving town prisons of the Middle Ages: a low, narrow run of rooms in the rock and masonry under the building, reached by a stair that gets tighter as you go.
This was not a prison for serving sentences. Imperial-city justice was quick: you were held here while the case was decided, and then fined, mutilated, banished or executed. The cells are single, timber-lined boxes with a bench; the smithy is where irons were fitted; the kitchen fed the prisoners; the well room supplied them; and the Folterkammer, the torture chamber, is where confession was obtained, which under imperial law was needed before a capital sentence could be passed. The guide will name the Lochschöffen and the Nachrichter — the city’s official interrogators and its executioner — and the executioner’s own house is a ten-minute walk away over the Pegnitz.
The practicalities are unusually strict and worth reading twice.
- Guided tour only, about 45 minutes, run by the Förderverein Nürnberger Felsengänge.
- Hourly, every day, 11:00 to 18:00. English tours are listed Monday–Thursday at 15:15, 16:15 and 17:15, and Friday–Sunday at 11:15, 12:15, 15:15, 16:15 and 17:15.
- Tickets are advance sale only, and the museum states plainly that no tickets are sold at the town hall. Buy online.
- No children under 10. Not step-free, sure footwear required, and the museum says people with claustrophobia should not take part, because the route runs through narrow passages.
The Renaissance wing of the town hall above it, built by Jakob Wolff the Younger from 1616, was gutted in 1945 and rebuilt; the prison below survived.
