Nobelpreisträger-Steg

The Nobelpreisträger-Steg — the Nobel Laureates' Bridge — is a footbridge along the lakefront whose railings are inscribed with the names of Nobel Prize winners who have attended the annual Lindau meetings. It connects the old town promenade to the Reichsplatz area and is an easy walk from the harbour.

The bridge is a straightforward piece of urban infrastructure that has been given an unusual second function — a record of the people who have gathered in this small Bavarian town every summer for over seventy years. The Nobel Laureates Meetings are one of Lindau's distinctive features: every June or July, the town fills with young scientists and their Nobel Prize-winning predecessors, and the combination of Alpine lake setting and serious intellectual purpose is genuinely strange and rather wonderful.

things to do sight
A story
The footbridge records the names of Nobel laureates who have attended the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, cast in metal silhouettes along the railing. Since 1951, the meetings have brought Nobel Prize winners together with young scientists each summer — an informal gathering that has become one of the most unusual intellectual events in the world. Walking the bridge is a peculiar experience: you are stepping over the names of the people who discovered the structure of DNA, split the atom, and mapped the human genome.