Discover Cottbus

Cottbus combines historic buildings and museums with distinctive park landscapes and wildlife viewing. When planning your trip, you can choose from a range of interests: urban and cultural history, garden design, outdoor events or a visit to the zoo.

Culture and history in Cottbus

The Church of St. Nicholas (Oberkirche St. Nikolai) is a Late Gothic, three-aisled brick hall church dating from the 15th century and is considered the largest church in Lower Lusatia. Climbing the 55-metre church tower offers views over the green city of Cottbus. The architecture and the view offer different highlights: below, the historic church building takes centre stage; above, the view across the city.

Several museums offer further ways to explore history and culture. The Wendish Museum in Cottbus/Chóśebuz is devoted to the cultural history of the Sorbs/Wends in Lower Lusatia. Through exhibits, traditional costumes and documents, its permanent exhibition offers insights into Sorbian/Wendish life from the past to the present, as well as into traditions, language and identity.

The Cottbus City Museum is the central museum for the city’s history. Its permanent exhibition, “The Memory of the City,” features collections about life, work and the culture of the region, as well as the development of Cottbus and Lower Lusatia. The Brandenburg Pharmacy Museum offers a more focused historical perspective: it displays fully preserved pharmacy interiors from the 19th and early 20th centuries, including dispensaries, herb and poison rooms, and a Galenic laboratory.

Those interested in aviation history will find 90 years of Cottbus airfield and aviation history in Lusatia at the Airfield Museum. The Spreewehr Mill, meanwhile, is one of the few surviving river mills in the eastern German states and is of technical and historical significance. It is located in northern Cottbus, where the Großen Spreewehr and Hammergraben meet.

Garden design and green spaces

Branitz Park shows just how dramatically a landscape can be shaped: between 1845 and 1871, Hermann, Prince of Pückler-Muskau, transformed flat agricultural land into a park of hills, valleys and waterways. Its distinctive features include two earth pyramids. The Lake Pyramid serves as Pückler’s tomb. The restored estate farm forms the gateway to this internationally significant work of garden design.

A permanent exhibition in the estate farm’s visitor centre explains Pückler’s and Cottbus painter Blechen’s artistic principles, as well as the creation and significance of Branitz Park. The exhibition also offers visitors a balloon ride over the park. The landscape itself and the ideas behind its design are thus presented as different aspects of a visit to the park.

The 55-hectare Spreeauenpark connects Cottbus’s inner-city green spaces with the Branitz landscape park. Waterside perennial gardens, old oak avenues, beech forests, extensive meadows and quiet areas define the park. The Niederlausitz Tertiary Forest in Spreeauenpark adds the areas of the Erratic Boulder Avenue, Mammoth Stump and Coal Bog to this park landscape.

Wiesenpark is used for open-air concerts, large celebrations and picnics. The park pavilion hosts events such as celebrations, open-air events, concerts, and theatre, light and fire performances; the event stage can accommodate up to 1,200 spectators. If you would like to plan your trip around a particular concert or celebration, check the dates for your travel period. An extensive network of paths leads from Wiesenpark to the other areas of Spreeauenpark.

Zoo and visitor highlights

Cottbus Zoo is located between the Spree, Branitz Park and Spreeauenpark. It is home to more than 1,200 animals from 170 species and has a petting zoo and a playground, making it particularly family-friendly. If these facilities are important to your plans, it is worth checking the latest visitor information.

The attractions offer different highlights: churches and city museums provide insight into architecture and history, Branitz and Spreeauenpark showcase landscaped parks, and the zoo focuses on animals and family-oriented facilities. When choosing a hotel in Cottbus, you can therefore consider which themes you would like to shape your stay, without combining individual sights into a single visit itinerary.

Discover more destinations: Kahren, Frankfurt / Oder, Brandenburg An Der Havel.

Return to the regional travel overview: Brandenburg.