The southern entrance to the old town has been controlled for over seven hundred years by the Linz Gate (Linzertor), a 28-metre tower built in the thirteenth century and rebuilt around 1485 in late-Gothic style by the local master builder Mathes Klayndl. It is one of the largest medieval gate towers anywhere in central Europe and remains the symbol of Freistadt. The traces of the original drawbridge supports can still be seen above the carriage entrance, and the outer face carries a painted royal double eagle, a single loophole, and an image of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, the patron saint of the city, along with the older spelling of the town’s name, Freystadt. A short walk to the west, the smaller semicircular Bürgerkorps Tower (Bürgerkorpsturm, also known as Schmidingerturm) rises from the surviving line of the outer wall. Built around 1777 as part of the late phase of the fortifications, it stands roughly 13.5 metres high, with firing slits aimed across the dry moat. Since 1967 the tower has housed the Bürgerkorps, an old citizens’ defence association that gave the tower its present name, and the upper room functions today as a small art gallery, with the surrounding Zwinger, the space between the inner and outer walls, displaying parts of the city’s original hand-bored wooden water pipes recovered from the medieval moat.

At the heart of the old town stretches the Main Square (Hauptplatz), a long rectangular space covering some 6,500 square metres and one of the largest Baroque town squares in Upper Austria. The shape and proportions go back to the original thirteenth-century layout of the town as a planned settlement, with the square placed at the intersection of the two main axes and the church set on the highest point of the urban grid. At its centre stands the Marian Fountain (Marienbrunnen), erected in 1704 as a work of the Salzburg sculptor Johann Baptist Spaz the Younger during the great Baroque transformation of the city. The fountain is a fine example of the smaller-scale provincial Baroque that flourished in this part of Austria in the early eighteenth century, with the Virgin Mary standing on a stone column above a basin that once served as one of the five public water points of the medieval town. Around the square, painted burgher houses, the former Piarist order school (now the Sparkasse building), and the exposed wall paintings of an unusually well-preserved rich merchant’s house all give the impression of a place that has been carefully tended across many centuries.

Set on the eastern side of the Main Square, the Town Hall (Rathaus) is a late-medieval and Renaissance building that was raised an extra storey in later centuries to give the structure its present proportions. It stands directly next to the rich merchant’s house with the exposed wall paintings and looks across the open square toward the Marian Fountain. The historic council chamber and other ceremonial rooms inside are still in use today as the working seat of the city administration. The original medieval town hall stood at the southern edge of the city, where the Old Town Hall Tower (Alter Rathausturm) is still part of the city wall, a robust Renaissance structure designed to defend the city as well as to govern it. That building today houses the district court, while the civic life of Freistadt has long since shifted into the lighter, taller Rathaus on the Main Square.

A short walk beyond the northern edge of the old town, just outside the Bohemian Gate, stands the Church of Our Lady, Maria Hilf (Liebfrauenkirche Maria Hilf), a quiet late-Gothic church with one of the longest histories in Freistadt. First mentioned in 1345 as a hospital and pilgrimage church dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the building was twice destroyed: once by fire in 1361, and again around 1422 during the Hussite Wars. The current building dates from the rebuilding that followed, with the choir completed around 1447 (a date still visible carved on one of the outer buttresses) and the nave added shortly afterwards. The church served the surrounding cemetery for centuries, until the burial ground was closed in 1855, and it is now a filial church of the main Freistadt parish. The neighbouring building, connected to the church through the sacristy, houses the School Sisters of Our Lady (Schulschwestern Unserer Lieben Frau), who continue to care for the church and run an adjoining secondary school. The setting, just outside the old walls and surrounded by the former cemetery garden, is one of the quietest and most atmospheric corners of the city.

Freistadt’s railway station is located around four kilometres south of the medieval old town, well outside the historic walls. The route into the centre is mostly flat and well signposted, taking around fifteen minutes by bike or roughly forty minutes on foot. A local city bus also runs between the station and the centre of the old town, providing a useful alternative for travellers without a bicycle. The old town itself is compact and entirely walkable, with the Linz Gate, the Main Square, the Marian Fountain, the Town Hall, and the Bürgerkorps Tower all within a five-minute walk of each other once you arrive. Bike racks are available at the station for shorter stops. For onward travel, the same line connects back toward Linz and the wider Danube region, as well as north into the Czech Republic, so Freistadt works equally well as a half-day excursion, an overnight detour, or a stepping stone for travellers continuing their journey toward Bohemia.