DE S T INAT IONS
F ROM DEUT S CHE BANK TO RIV ER BANK
Frankfurt may be Germany’s economic powerhouse but there’s plenty of pleasure to be had outside of business hours in this city’s green spaces, restaurants and taverns
WOR D S A NDREW E A ME S
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o you’re in Frankfurt for a couple of days, or maybe longer. You’ve been here before, on hurried visits, but always for work, not play. Maybe on this occasion you’ve got a bit of spare time
in your schedule, and you want an “in” place to meet up informally with colleagues, or just somewhere to get away from the brisk pace of city life. Preferably somewhere free of herds of tourists, too. Tese places do exist. Tis sharp-
suited city – currently host to no fewer than 218 different banks – may be hard to like at first sight. It has a rather soulless centre – partly the consequence of prolonged aerial bombardment during World War II – but there are a number of places
busin e s s t r a ve lle r . c o m
outside the centre that are worth seeking out. Places that will help you feel that you’ve got under the skin of Germany’s financial capital.
PALMENGARTEN AND THE UNIVERSITY Firstly, there’s a good chance that you’re in Frankfurt for a trade fair in the Messe centre, or for a meeting in the adjacent business district, both of which are north and west of downtown. Te streets here bristle with glass and steel, creating a chilly no man’s land of skyscrapers and scurrying suits which could be anywhere in the world. But there is a soſter sanctuary at hand in the form of the Palmengarten (
palmengarten.de), a green oasis just up off Bockenheimer Landstrasse, one of the main business arteries.
Te Palmengarten is a more
compact and central equivalent of London’s Kew Gardens, fronted by a giant Palmhaus villa that could easily be a cream-cake hotel on the Cote D’Azur. Here you can roam through a variety of world ecosystems without leaving downtown Frankfurt, through everything from savannah grassland to alpine plant rockery, from an English rose garden to a waterlily nirvana. It is a real testament to the stress-relieving effect of green space. Most of it is al fresco, and densely
landscaped around lakes and little hills, with steppe, subantarctic and tropical zones somehow managing to coexist in the Middle-European fresh air. For the real exotics there’s also a series of environments in a set of glasshouses, from arid deserts →
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