Augsburg Audioguides

Augustus founded the city in 15 BC as a staging point for the Alps campaigns, and Augsburg has been quietly accumulating significance ever since. The Fuggerei, built in 1516 by the banking family Jakob Fugger, is the oldest social housing complex in the world still in active use. Residents today pay the same annual rent as in the sixteenth century: 0.88 euros plus three daily prayers for the Fugger family's souls. It is a working neighbourhood of modest Gothic houses with its own gates, church, and fountain, and you can walk through it on any afternoon.

The city's wealth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came from the Fuggers and Welsers, banking dynasties who financed Habsburg emperors and funded the conquest of Venezuela.

That money left beautiful marks: the Schaezlerpalais is a Rococo mansion from 1765 with one of the finest ballrooms in southern Germany, now a museum. The Renaissance Rathaus, completed in 1620, has a Golden Hall with a ceiling that took thirteen years to gild. In 1530, the Augsburg Confession was presented here, defining Lutheran theology for centuries.