Malmö, Sweden

Across the Øresund strait from Copenhagen, Sweden’s most southerly and culturally diverse city has developed into the region’s art and music hub with an opera house, concert hall, its own symphony orchestra, a museum complex and a contemporary art scene. It’s also close to sandy beaches, has a dockland which is still gritty, and pleasant canals.

Every summer since 1985, an estimated 1.4 million people head to the city for the Malmöfestivalen, eight days of open-air concerts, exhibitions, street performances and food trucks in August, where everything except the food is free.

Malmö Symphony Orchestra has its home at the Malmö Live Konserthus. Ticket prices for classical concerts start at 145 krona (£11.30) and they hold several free “morning concerts” a year.

Heading south from the concert hall, over the canal and past the opera house, is the Pildammsparken, a huge park with lakes, statues, well-trimmed hedges surrounding picnic areas and the occasional free summer concert in the auditorium. The Kungsparken has wide, tree-lined avenues, benches and a hidden cafe, running just south of the Malmöhus Slott castle. Inside are three of Malmö’s main museums: the Konstmuseum for Nordic art and furniture; the newly named Tekniska museum for science and technology; and an aquarium, the Akvariet. One ticket allows entry to all of them (adults £3, under-19s free).

Between the two parks is the Konsthall, one of Scandinavia’s largest contemporary arts centres, and free to enter. It’s huge, open plan and bright, in line with Malmö’s general philosophy that the arts should be accessible to everyone. The centre’s spaces are used for theatrical performance as well as exhibitions. A visual art show by Roman Signer runs from 3 June to 10 September, followed by Swedish artist Ingela Ihrman whose work combines video, text and costume and continues into 2024.

Equally large is Malmö’s modern art museum Moderna Museet, a former power station with a bright orange, latticed facade. The current exhibition, Assymetrical Grammar by Guadeloupe-born Jimmy Robert, runs until 3 September and includes live performances based on Marcel Duchamp’s painting Nude Descending a Staircase (1912). Entrance to the gallery is £4 for adults and free for under-19s.

Eat: Saltimporten Canteen
The lunch menu changes daily at this former salt warehouse overlooking the harbour. They also serve excellent vegetarian options and natural wines. Open weekdays 11am-2pm, no booking.
saltimporten.com

Stay: Grand Circus Hotel

If you’re visiting Malmö for the culture, go the whole way and stay in a colourful circus wagon. The Clown’s wagon has one bed while the Acrobat’s has a double and two singles. The Snake Charmer’s wagon is turquoise with framed portraits of snakes. Some have kitchens and all share a bathroom. Wagons from £70, including two free bikes.
grandcircushotel.com

Kraków, Poland

For culture seekers, Kraków has a flourishing, year-long calendar of opera, ballet and classical music concerts as well as art and literature fairs, and its five-day pierogi (Polish dumpling) festival in August.

The city’s Opera Krakowska reopens with Puccini’s Turandot in September while over the summer the company is performing Johann Strauss’s The Gypsy Baron and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana in the city’s botanical gardens. Tickets to the opera house start at 35 zlotys (£6.50) rising to £27 for the best seats.

A separate Royal Opera festival runs from 16 June to 9 July at the Philharmonic Hall, beginning with Gioachino Rossini’s Il Signor Bruschino and ending with his Il Vero Omaggio and The Barber of Seville. Tickets cost £10-£13 for operas and £6-£7.50 for chamber music. The Sinfonietta Cracovia, which specialises in classical Polish music also plays at the Kraków Philharmonic and several other venues throughout the city.

There is a huge range of museums in Kraków, almost all of them managed by either the Museum of Kraków (MK) or the National Museum of Kraków (MNK). Poland’s most valuable art collection is in the MNK-run Princes Czartoryski Museum, which includes Leonardo’s Lady With an Ermine (adults £8.60, concessions £5.70). MNK museums are free on Tuesdays, and for anyone staying for a long period, they can have unlimited access to 12 sites for six months (adults £23).

The 18 MK-run museums all have one day a week when entry is free (check on muzeumkrakowa.pl). The museums are a great mix of the esoteric – the ground floor of the villa of Poland’s second greatest composer, Karol Szymanowski – as well as the essential – Oskar Schindler’s enamel factory (free on Mondays) and the 18th- and 19th-century art collection at Sukiennice. Entrance tickets give access to multiple other museums within three months of purchase.

At the Mocak contemporary art centre, which was built in the former Schindler factory, collection exhibitions are free on Thursdays.

Within the Unesco-listed old town, the annual Capella Cracoviensis classical music series runs organ recitals in churches around Kraków until July where all concerts are free. The Jewish Culture festival in the Kazimierz quarter includes an outdoor concert on 1 July.

Eat: Milkbar Tomasza
The refurbished workers’ canteen is a great place to eat platefuls of pierogi dumplings (full portion £4). They do an all-day breakfast, salads and lunchtime set menu.
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Stay: Plaza Boutique Hotel
A popular, four-star hotel close to the old town and near the Vistula River. The hotel has a fitness room, restaurant and sauna.
Doubles from £30, plazahotelkrakow.pl

Montpellier, France

This city of a hundred fountains and cultural hub of France’s Occitanie region is an elegant and lively base from which to visit the beaches, salt pans and fishing ports of the south, the Camargue and gateway to Roman Provence.

Montpellier’s Dance festival celebrates its 43rd edition from 20 June to 4 July and organises free, open-air dance classes throughout the festival. If visitors buy the Agora card for €20, there’s a 30% reduction on all ticket prices; and for under-26s, the card costs €10 and seat prices begin at just €5.

The city’s other main summer event is the Festival des Architectures Vives, a collection of ephemeral, contemporary art works set within the courtyards of the city’s private mansions. It’s free and runs from 14 to 18 June, designed to raise awareness of Montpellier’s rich architectural heritage and flourishing art scene.

After the Louvre in Paris, Montpellier’s Musée Fabre is one of the finest and largest art museums in France. A highlight is Gustave Courbet’s Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet, portraying the artist with his paints, smock and easel on his back, meeting his patron in the countryside outside Montpellier. The museum also has a substantial collection by Pierre Soulages who lived in nearby Sète and whose artistic “outrenoir” revelation in January 1979 caused him to paint almost exclusively in black. The museum runs family visits to the Soulages room entitled “Who’s afraid of the dark?”.

Montpellier’s contemporary art museum Mo.Co (adults €8, students and under-18s free) opened in 2019 in a 19th-century palatial residence with a garden in the form of a world map and restaurant set among the trees. Its younger neighbour, Mo.Co. Panacée, exhibits more experimental creations and holds free art lectures and conferences every Thursday evening. Like most French museums, Fabre and Mo.Co. are free on the first Sunday of the month.

Catering for more than 75,000 students, Montpellier has plenty of free-to-enter cultural sites and activities. There’s no charge to visit Frac Occitanie, a huge gallery that displays works from France’s contemporary art collection consisting of more than 35,000 works from 600 artists. In addition, the Pavillon Populaire, the elegant headquarters of the students’ union in the 1890s, is now a prestigious photography gallery, and the Jardin des Plantes, France’s oldest botanical gardens (1593), complete with extravagant glasshouses and rare trees, are both free. Gardeners also offer free tours (reservation required) on themes such as medicinal plants, remarkable trees and the English garden.

Eat: Tartine et sac-à-dos

Inspired by their travels, friends Anaïs and Charlotte offer inventive salads, fusions of burrata, marinated vegetables with parmesan shavings and chickpeas as well as homemade desserts such as brioche perdue. Open for breakfast, brunch and lunch.
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Stay: Royal Hotel
Within walking distance of the TGV station and Place de la Comédie, this stylish, eco-friendly hotel has doubles from €100 and family rooms from €145.
royalhotelmontpellier.com

San Sebastián, Spain

The Basque country’s picturesque culinary capital, San Sebastián offers a rich and varied roster of cultural events throughout the year including classical concerts in August and Spain’s most prestigious film festival in September. It also has plenty of free events at theTabakalera arts centre, outdoor shows during Semana Grande in August and free entrance to a lighthouse art installation.

Norah Jones, Joss Stone and Abdullah Ibrahim headline San Sebastián’s 58th Jazzaldia festival in July, but there are also eight free concerts on the beach featuring trombonist Fred Wesley, London-based Blue Lab Beats, Ezra Collective and veteran lineup the Village People.

The Quincena Musical (musical fortnight) actually runs for a month throughout August. Inaugurated in 1939, it’s one of Europe’s oldest classical music festivals. Tickets go on sale on 20 June with big discounts available with the Amigos card. Standout concerts this year include Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (4 August), Swan Lake performed by Ballet Preljocaj (7 August), and Mahler’s Eighth Symphony with 400 performers on stage (18 Aug), all at the seafront Kursaal Auditorium.

The San Sebastián film festival is also based in the Kursaal with screenings of short and animated films taking place all over the city. This year the festival runs from 22 to 30 September. Anyone can attend with prices starting at about €8 and free screenings in the Plaza Okendo.

The cultural highlight of the city is the Tabakalera, San Sebastián’s former tobacco factory and now a centre for contemporary culture, which includes a library, exhibition spaces, a theatre, cinema and, on the top floor, a restaurant and boutique hotel. Most Tabakalera events are free except for the cinema (adults from €4, children under 12 €1). The Eduardo Chillida sculpture park (adults €12, under-18s €6, under-8s free) is good for an arty ramble, but equally inspiring (and totally free) is the sculpture walking tour along the coast where Chillida’s Wind Comb is at the far west of La Concha bay. If the sea is calm, take the 10-minute boat ride to Cristina Iglesias’s transformation of the city’s abandoned lighthouse Hondalea on the Isla de Santa Clara. The boat costs €4 return trip, but entry to the lighthouse is free.

Aste Nagusia or “The Great Week” is the main festival of San Sebastián, celebrated annually in August during the Feast of the Assumption week. As part of the festivities, which will take place from 12-19 August this year, there is the increasingly popular “Al Abordaje” (“all aboard”), where festival goers dressed as pirates use small homemade boats to journey across the bay and to Concha Beach.

Eat: Borda Berri
One of San Sebastián’s best known pintxos bars, where a glass of wine to accompany your white asparagus and truffle mayonnaise costs less than €2.
bordaberriakiseguisa.com

Stay: Legazpi Doce Rooms & Suites
In a smart, 19th-century building in the pedestrianised centre, the hotel has 11 rooms and six apartments, decorated in the red, green and white of the Basque country. Free breakfast in nearby Amelie Coffee if booking directly with the hotel.
Doubles from €68, legazpidoce.com

Cologne, Germany

One of Germany’s most renowned destinations for opera, art, live music and literature festivals, Cologne offers surprisingly cheap deals for its high culture and museum entrances.

This year’s summer festival, Sommer Köln, runs from 24 June to 6 August, most of it outdoors and much of it free. There’s everything from slam poetry and cabaret to comedy shows, night-time projections and rocking beer gardens. Cologne’s opera season closes with a vocal festival at this year’s Opern-Air at the Tanzbrunnen venue on 25 June.

The city’s Kölner Philharmonie concert hall hosts its own Sommer festival events, which this year include Berlin Berlin, celebrating the music of the roaring 20s, Ballet Revolución from Cuba and finishing with two matinees andsix nights of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.

The Kölner Philharmonie play free lunchtime concerts and occupy the same building as the Museum Ludwig, one of two exceptional art museums in Cologne. The Ludwig is known for photography, abstract and pop art, while the Wallraf-Richartz Museum & Fondation Corboud is probably the finest art museum in Germany with important collections of medieval, baroque, French impressionist and German romantic art.

Cologne’s biggest tourist attraction is the Kölner Dom, the largest cathedral in Germany and the tallest gothic structure in northern Europe. Entrance is free but it’s worth paying a little extra to ascend the 533 steps to the viewing platform for a panorama of the Rhine and rooftops of Cologne (adults €6, students and children €3, family €12). Catch the 10 o’clock high mass on the first Sunday of each month in Latin, then download the free app to follow a spiritual tour of the cathedral.

Cologne’s urban arts, vintage shops, basement venues and graffiti are never far from high culture. In the Jesuit-run St Peter’s church near the Schildergasse shops, Peter Paul Rubens’ Crucifixion of St Peter hangs on a plain wall beneath revolving glassware and neon artwork.

The best way to explore cultural Cologne on a budget is by using the KölnCard. Available at the tourist office or online, the card costs €9 for 24 hours or €19 for a group card, – up to five people – and offers free public transport in Cologne with 20-50% off museum entrances, tours, shops and some restaurants.

Eat: Bei Oma Kleinmann
Cologne has more than 770 pubs with local Kölsche (beer) culture part of daily life. Food is hearty: ham hock with sauerkraut, rye bread with cheese and mustard, or Rievkooche (potato pancakes). Schnitzel is also top of the menu and is a speciality at Bei Oma Kleinmann, though they also do vegetarian options.

Stay: Hotel Zur Malzmühle
Within walking distance of the Ludwig museum and concert hall, the hotel has beds in the style of wooden barrels, eco-friendly products in the bathroom and an on-site Brauhaus (craft brewery).
Doubles from €114, hotelzurmalzmuehle.de