Nürnberger Christkindlesmarkt

Operating continuously since 1628, save for wartime interruptions, the Nürnberger Christkindlesmarkt is widely considered the most famous Christmas market in the world, and the benchmark against which every other German Weihnachtsmarkt is measured. Held throughout Advent in Nuremberg's medieval old town, the market draws over two million visitors annually to a setting that feels genuinely unchanged by the centuries surrounding it.

The market's wooden stalls, arranged beneath Nuremberg's towering Gothic church spires, sell handicrafts, ornaments and gifts alongside the food and drink that give German Christmas markets their particular seasonal character: Nuremberg's own spicy gingerbread, lebkuchen, along with its famously small, intensely flavoured bratwursts, mulled wine and freshly baked pastries fill the cold December air with the scent that has become synonymous with the German festive season.

For a market this old and this widely imitated, the experience still carries a genuine sense of tradition rather than spectacle — a reminder that long before Christmas markets became a globally exported concept, Nuremberg had already been running one, largely unchanged, for the better part of four centuries.