This German city may be considered the most boring Euro 2024 host – but it’s actually a cultural marvel

Frankfurt? Isn’t that one of the more boring Euro 2024 host cities – the one by the river Main with all the financial institutions and banks, a sort of German Canary Wharf with great cakes?

If you were watching the games thinking that this is the dull bit of Deutschland, then reconsider. Frankfurt has world-class museums and galleries and the cultural mix that comes from being one of Germany’s most diverse cities. As well as dramatic football, get ready for Botticelli, Turkish food and cool hotels. Prepare, also, for a city determined to dispel any suggestion it isn’t exciting.

This is most obvious around Alt-Sachsenhausen, the area south of the Main River where the cobbled medieval lanes are full of bars and, come evening, the atmosphere is a combustible cross between York and Magaluf. All tremendous fun if you are inclined to be boisterous but if your tastes are a little edgier then seek out the bars in the Bahnhofsviertel area, the streets immediately around the immense Neo-Renaissance front of Frankfurt railway station.

If that’s too edgy for you then slip into Wiesenhüttenplatz, where each evening Yok Yok Eden, one of the city’s buzziest open-air bars, spreads its tables under a canopy of trees.

If you’re planning a few jugs of Frankfurt’s deceptively strong take on cider, Apfelwein, you’ll need to eat. Head for the parallel avenues, Kaiserstraße and Münchener Straße, that run from the station east to the ‘new’ opera house – one of the city’s many handsome chunks of under-appreciated post-war modernism. On Kaiserstraße you’ll find plenty of modern European food options but cross over to Münchener Straße and you enter a world of Turkish and middle-eastern cafes and restaurants.

Look up above the street for more entertainment – Frankfurt, nicknamed Mainhattan, is hooked on rooftop drinking. There are bars on top of museums and apartment stores, you can even drink in rooftop bars that are overlooked by rooftop bars. There’s a great relaxed space above Gekko House, a chic boutique hotel that comes with a Chicago style-grill restaurant, where customers can cast their eyes up from their post-BBQ whisky sour to the Skybar, a circular terrace 199 metres…