Lindau Harbor Entrance

Lindau Harbor is guarded by an unlikely pair: a six-metre-high, 50-tonne sandstone lion sculpted by Munich professor Johann von Halbig and Bavaria’s only lighthouse, a clock-faced tower rising 36 metres above Lake Constance. Both were completed in 1856, transforming the entrance into an unmistakable announcement that visitors had arrived in Bavaria.

The lighthouse replaced the medieval Mangturm, where a beacon had guided ships since the tower’s construction around 1230. During the new lighthouse’s earliest years, its keeper maintained an open oil fire in large pans while also operating a bell and foghorn. The harbor itself was built alongside the Ludwig South-North Railway, allowing passengers and goods arriving by train to continue their journeys across the lake.

Then, in 2002, Lindau’s thoroughly Bavarian harbor was sold to the municipal utilities of Constance, a city across the water in Baden-Württemberg. Years of negotiations followed before Lindau regained the harbor in 2010, returning its lion, lighthouse and grand lakeside gateway to Bavarian ownership once again.