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Soon after the town had been founded in 1248, the citizens decided that their new town needed a church. The main altar of the new church was consecrated in 1298. At the start of the Reformation, the church accommodated a total of 39 altars. Lightning and fires are known from old documents to have caused extensive damages in the 17th century. From 1832 to 1841, the church was comprehensively restored under the master builder F.W. Buttel. The three-nave hall structure with its architectural singularities burnt down again in 1945. Only the exterior walls and the base of the tower remained. In 1975, the municipal authorities started to rebuild the church with a view to using the building as a concert hall. After the historical shell and the tower were restored and a state of the art concert hall was inserted which complied with the highest architectural and acoustic standards, the building was officially inaugurated in 2001 with a concert gala. The tower now houses a permanent exhibition about brick Gothic. The church architecture culminates in the aesthetic highlight of the eastern gable which represents one of the finest achievements of Northern German brick Gothic.  Its tripartite traceries which are freestanding against the gable and its elaborate gablets actually established an entirely new building tradition in this region.

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Soon after the town had been established in 1248, new settlers arrived, bringing with them Franciscan monks who proceeded to erect their monastery at the northern edge of the town.
After the reformation, the monastery was converted into an almshouse in 1552. In 1614, the dormitory was destroyed by fire. After 1945, it was put to various uses. In 1979 (and after a successful restoration), it served the municipality as its civil registry office. The monastery’s refectory, the oldest building in town, is being restored since 1996, with a view to eventually using it as a museum. The vaulted ambulatory and the refectories with their stellar vaults are of particular architectural interest and artistic value. St. John’s Church – the monastery’s church – was originally built as a small field-stone structure. After several fires in the 14th century, the church was extended with a larger nave to the South and provided with cross-vaults as well as a long choir. The latter was used as a grain storage room after the Reformation and partly collapsed in the 19th century. It was reconstructed in its present form in the course of the extensive restoration works between 1890 and 1894. Highlights of the church interior include the Baroque altar and the Renaissance pulpit.

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After the town had to make do with a stockade and earthen ramparts for the first 50 years of its history, around 1300 Heinrich of Mecklenburg allowed the citizens to erect stone ramparts for the protection of their town. And protect it they did: they built a circular structure with a diameter of roughly 800 meters, comprising three moats, two earthen walls, the city wall, two towers, 55 wiek houses and five ring roads. The ramparts were accentuated by their four gates. The entire structure has been almost completely preserved and represents in its detail as well as its complexity a unique monument of international importance. The city wall – 2300 m long and about 7 m high – has been built by master craftsmen out of boulders and crowned with bricks. In total 57 wiek houses were integrated into the wall loopholes in regular intervals. These were originally intended as defensive reinforcements and later converted into half-timbered residential buildings. Two of the wiek houses were replaced by towers in the 14th century. One of these towers, the so-called “Fangelturm“, can still be visited. A second tower, originally located at the bottom of the Turmstraße, the “tower street“, collapsed in 1899.

Friedland Gate
The Friedland gate, constructed around 1300 in a style of transition between Romanesque and Gothic, is the most ancient of the four city gates. It comprises the main gate on the town side and the outer gate as well as the fortified walls which link the two. In front of the outer gate, a semi-circular ring work was erected in the 16th century, creating a tower complex of impressive dimensions.The tower now houses a picture gallery and a cafeteria.

Stargard Gate
The Stargard Gate was constructed in the early 14th century. On the inside of the wall, nine life-size terracotta figures – whose exact meaning remains a mystery to this very day – are looking over the town. The rich decorations of the gate – especially its outer parts – demonstrate the civic pride and aesthetic inclinations of the town’s medieval citizens which went hand in hand with their willingness to defend their city against all comers. In the main gate, the medieval roof timbering has been preserved.

Treptow Gate
With its height of 32 meters, the Treptow Gate is easily the town’s most magnificent gate. It was finished in the early 15th century and has accommodated the Municipal Museum since 1883.

New Gate
The New Gate was built at a later date in a Neo-Gothic style. Only the main gate has survived which today houses the offices of the Fritz Reuter Society. On the inside of the wall, nine more of the mysterious terracotta figures are keeping watch.

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The early Gothic, unvaulted brick structure was built in the 14th century before the gates of the city, and originally had no tower. St. George, protector of the ill and needy, was held in high esteem at the period of the Crusades. In the vicinity of the chapel, pilgrims, who often returned home afflicted with leprosy, found shelter and care, as did those suffering from the plague at a later date. In the centuries that followed, the small buildings surrounding St. George’s were used as a hospital for the inhabitants of the city. Sculptures from the chapel are now to be seen in the Neubrandenburg Regional Museum.
Externally, the chapel is horizontally structured. It has a fieldstone base. About a metre above the base there is a double “German course,” normal bricks laid diagonally. Under the eaves runs a quatrefoil frieze. Vertical structuring elements are windows and blind niches. The north and west portals show multiple stepping. The arch is slightly widened to form an obtuse angle. There is a sundial on the west façade.

the building:
In contrast to other cities, the Neubrandenburg fortifications have no walkway. At intervals of about 30 metres there are 3 to 4 metre defensive projections, so-called “Wieks,” a low-German word meaning “bay.” They once served as bastions and had loopholes in the three external walls. Two such “bays” were converted into sturdy towers (Turmstraße and at the Franciscan monastery – Fangel tower). East of the Station Gate two “bays” are to be seen in their original functional aspect. On the initiative of the museum society, one bay house tower was restored in the early 20th century, and the other in the 1980s. The Wieks were open on the city side and had pointed arch vaults. A massive flight of stairs led to the first floor. The other floors were to be reached by ladder. After the Thirty Years’ War, the structures lost their military significance and were largely converted into half-timbered residential houses. Many of the original 56 have been reconstructed over the past three decades. They are now given over to a variety of uses, mostly open to the public.

Among medieval fortifications in Neubrandenburg one of special importance is a circle-shaped fortification which is 2300 metres long. It consists of city walls and 60-70 metre wide embankments in front of those. Originally there were only four entrance gates to the city. The Railway Gate was built when the Friedrich-Franz railway connection was established in 1864. The city gates opened only a year earlier. The entrance through the busy Wollweberstraße is even newer. Before the Duke of Meklemburg, Henry the Lion, permitted the citizens to raise stone walls, the defence fortifications consisted of dirt embankments and one palisade. Until the 30-year war the defence wall provided effective protection against enemies. After the war they lost their significance. Vegetation overgrew the embankments and now the trees have made a forest. The almost wholly preserved city walls are unique in northern Germany. They are made of field stones and finished with brick only at the top. The walls are 7 metres high and reach a thickness of 1.4 metres in places. 

the building:
In order to gain the strategic advantage of height over attacking forces, two “Wiekhäuser”, a unique type of bastion in the city wall, were replaced by towers at particularly exposed positions in the enceinte. One of the towers, located at the end of Turmstraße, collapsed in 1899. The Fangel Tower, at the end of Darrenstraße, has survived the centuries. On the city side of the Fangel Tower the entrance was six metres above ground level, certainly accessed by a flight of stairs. The lower entrance was added at a later date. The dungeon in the tower was used as city gaol well into the 19th century. The three floors have loopholes and the upper platform is battlemented. In 1848, the tower was restored and decorated with ornamental ring, conical spire, and finial.

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Of the Premonstratensian abbey built on a hill at the northern end of the Lake Tollense, only the rib-vaulted cellar of the east wing has survived the centuries. It owes its survival to the circumstance that a half-timbered building was constructed over it in the 18th century after the gradual dilapidation of the abbey buildings. We have little knowledge about the original state of the structures. Only large-scale archaeological investigations will provide more information about when building began and the extent of the complex. Under the Baroque-period half-timbered structure there are massive field-stone foundations whose rectangular form indicates the extent of the east wing. In the course of far-reaching alterations in the late Gothic period, cross-vaulted rooms were inserted between the foundation walls. Given the ubiquitous four-sided ribbing, the rooms with their impressive vaulting can be ascribed to the 15th century. Access to the individual rooms was provided by doors set in the foundation walls and over a brick spiral staircase linking the cellar with the ground floor. Other architectural features of the cellar rooms include a niche cupboard with slots to take wooden shelving and the two brick keystones over pointed arch doorways.