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Bremen can justifiably claim to be a city of culture. Avante-garde and Old Masters, large-scale theatre and drama workshops, classical concerts and contemporary sounds, tradition and provocation, established customs and delight in experimentation are all represented here. Bremen's theatres, museums, concert halls and art collections offer an inexhaustible diversity with regard to both the artistic spectrum they cover and the cultural events they put on.

Museums. Your journey through foreign lands and continents begins in Bremen, right next to the main station - at the Überseemuseum. Once a collection of exotic items brought back from the colonies, it now invites visitors to make a sensitive approach to overseas cultures, and to encounter the realities of life outside Europe. The exhibits are presented in a fantastic ambience, ranging from Japanese gardens to African village scenes to a comprehensive trip round the world through space and time. The oceans beckon just 60 kilometres away. They too are condensed into museum format in a way that is unparalleled throughout Germany. At the German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven, the seafaring tradition is preserved with original veteran ships in their own museum harbour, and with the legacies of famous ships and seafarers. This is all compressed into a longing look back over mankind's history on the water. The Bremen Museum of Art and Cultural History deals solely with the history of Bremen - and is none the less exciting for that. Here, too, the visitor will discover highlights: the collections of crafts, for example, and the vividly told story of Bremen's emergence as an international seaport over the centuries.

Theatre. The term "Bremen Style" refers to the originality of Bremen's productions. They are usually more spectacular than elsewhere, almost always more ambitious, sometimes controversial. But they always get noticed and are often rewarded with requests for guest performances. Opera, drama, and ballet are committed to both the experimental and the classical repertoire. Shakespeare is a permanent feature of Bremen's theatre programme. The Bremer Shakespeare Company has dedicated a whole theatre to the English dramatist and created a theatre of sheer joie-de-vivre. Shakespeare at its best, presented as Elizabethan folk theatre with baroque magnificence and sensuality. The theatre has long since gained an international reputation.

Art collections. The Neues Museum Weserburg sets new standards. Outstanding contemporary works from the world's leading private collections are gathered here to form Europe's most representative display of modern art, presented in a new kind of museum. This is a highlight that has few equals. One of them is the Kunsthalle with its respected collection of German and French Impressionists. Small but beautiful are the words that describe Gerhard-Marcks-Haus, a building that houses the sculptor's legacy and enjoys a high profile as a place for superb exhibitions. And something you will find only in Bremen - the art collections in Böttcherstrasse, which include the most significant works by Paula Becker- Modersohn, Heinrich Vogeler, Bernhard Hoetger and others whose previously unrecognised work now has an international reputation.

Music. Beethoven provided the crucial impulse. In 1802, he gave his first symphony its world premiere in Bremen - other premieres followed. The Philharmonische Staatsorchester, for example and, the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie, a particularly notable ensemble that enjoys an excellent international reputation in the field of chamber music, nurture in Bremen - musical tradition. Internationality is a seal of quality at the Bremen Music Festival. This highlight of the Bremen music season is held in autumn every year and sets the highest possible standards with concerts by the most brilliant orchestras, the most famous conductors and soloists.

Bremen's Market Square is regarded as one of the most beautiful in Europe. Its ensemble of historic buildings is unique and consists of the Town Hall, dating from 1405, St Peter's Cathedral, begun in 1042, the "Schötting", Bremen's historic Chamber of Commerce built in 1537, the merchants' houses that date back to the Weser Renaissance era around 1600, and the statue of Roland, the symbol of the city's freedom, erected in 1404. The modern "Haus der Bürgerschaft", Bremen's state parliament building, was built in 1966 and forms a sensitive counterpoint to the rest of the square.

Schnoor: This Street is a synthesis of the arts. It was created as the perfect symbiosis of traditional and expressionist brick architecture. The project, that took until 1934 to complete, was initiated by the Bremen coffee merchant and patron of the arts, Ludwig Roselius (Kaffee HAG) in 1904, and carried out by the architects, Scotland and Runge and the sculptor Bernhard Hoetger. This is the home of the much-admired Paula Becker-Modersohn exhibition and the Roselius Museum with its collection of items representing the heyday of Hanseatic merchant tradition. And every day at 12 noon, 3 p.m. and 6 p.m., you can hear the chimes in the street. Figures of the most famous ocean voyagers emerge and revolve to the sound of the bells.

Windmill on the "Wall"

You will find windmills in other parts of Bremen, too. Five classic windmills have survived in Bremen. The one in the Oberneuland district is open as a museum. In the inner city area, the Windmill on the Wall, which was in operation up until 1950, has been preserved. It is now the landmark of the "Wallanlagen", the old city fortifications that were torn down in 1802 and turned into a park.

The Town Musicians

The Brothers Grimm tell their story in a fairy tale, and Bremen has erected a monument to them: the Bremen Town Musicians, four animals who were threatened with death at home and hoped to survive in freedom in Bremen. Their sculpture, taking the form of the donkey, the dog, the cat and the rooster standing on each others' backs, stands on the West side of the Town Hall and was created by the sculptor, Gerhard Marcks in 1953. You will find other interpretations of the Town Musicians theme in Böttcherstrasse and in the Schnoor quarter.

Drop Tower

It's 146 metres high and slender as a reed. Science has given Bremen its most recent landmark: the drop tower, a laboratory facility that reaches skyward at the Centre for Applied Space Technology and Microgravitation Research (ZARM from the German name) at Bremen University. The tower is used for experimental research into weightlessness that would otherwise only be possible in outer space, away from earth's gravitational pull.

Whenever there's a football to be kicked or a bike saddle to be ridden on, when flooded meadows freeze over in winter and invite them to execute bold figures on skates, Bremen residents are eager to take part. Unless, that is, they're out on the water, sailing in their own ships towards the North Sea or messing about on the numerous watercourses in the city and its surrounding area.

Bremen residents are sports fans. More than 160,000 citizens are members of over 130 clubs - and that's not counting the pub football teams, the informal "kick-abouts", subscribers to sport and fitness clubs and a vast army of joggers. Fans at outstanding sporting events in - not only in its active form, but also equally as a spectator pastime, enjoy sport. Bremen's chock-full sporting calendar, crammed with top-class events, gives abundant opportunity for watching sport.

Every two weeks, for example, the Weser Stadium, with capacity for 40,000 fans, is the venue for battles for the top position in Germany's Federal Football League. In SV Werder, Bremen has a top European team. Werder has twice won the German league championship, twice won the national cup, and was also crowned the king of European soccer in 1992 when the team won the European Cup. That is the most successful record of any German football club over the last 10 years. And it makes the journey to the stadium of this football stronghold worthwhile.

If Bremen is a soccer stronghold, it's also a bastion of handball. Credit for sporting achievement in this discipline goes to the TuS Walle women's handball team. With a series of championship titles and cup triumphs under their belts, they have advanced to become the number one in Germany and - nationally almost unbeatable - have now established themselves as one of the best women's handball teams in the world. These "power women" know how to thrill sports fans.

So do powerful male calves. The leg muscles referred to here belong to the top international cycling professionals who annually descend on Bremen at new year to compete in the world's biggest six-day cycle race. For people in Bremen, this spectacular event is just as much, if not more, a Volksfest as it is a top-class sporting occasion. In fact, it is sometimes claimed that the fast and furious race is only an excuse for meeting friends for a few beers - something hundreds of thousands of people do during the six-day classic race.

Yet sport in Bremen is not always accompanied by noisy, boozy enthusiasm. The surroundings and applause at the top-class equestrian events, which also put Bremen on an international level, are far more refined. Elite shows jumpers are guests in Bremen twice a year - at the International Bremen Horse Show in February, and at the German Classics, which take place every October and offer the highest prize money in international show jumping. Meanwhile, at the race course, thoroughbreds whose talent is expressed in speed rather than jumping ability hold court 12 times a year, in contests that include important preliminary heats for the Derby. This, by the way, is the home course of "Fahrhof", Germany's leading stud farm, which is owned by the Jacobs family.

And Bremen can even go one better than the aesthetic attraction of riding - with ballroom dancing in its most perfect form. In World and European championships, the formation dancers of TSG Bremerhaven have shown 16 times that they are the world's best interpreters of Latin American music. And every new season brings further proof that they will be maintaining that position for a while yet. Anyone who sees them dance in Bremen is sure to become a permanent fan of their captivating skill.

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