Things to do
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Charlottenburg Palace
Former summer residence of Prussian royalty, built 1695, 1790, featuring Baroque and Rococo interiors and extensive French-formal gardens.
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Checkpoint Charlie
Famous Cold War border crossing between East and West Berlin, rebuilt as a replica in 2000 and now one of the city's most-visited tourist sites.
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Gendarmenmarkt
Classical 18th-century plaza bordered by the French Cathedral, German Cathedral (both 1701, 1708), and the Konzerthaus, designed as a civic ensemble by royal architects.
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German Historical Museum
Chronological survey of German history from medieval times through the present, housed in the 1695 Zeughaus (arsenal) on Museum Island.
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Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church
Neo-Romanesque church completed 1895, destroyed in World War II, with ruins preserved alongside a modernist 1960s replacement structure.
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Potsdamer Platz
Rebuilt commercial and entertainment district of the 1990s, 2000s featuring Sony Center's glass pavilion, high-rise office blocks, and the rebuilt 1920s-style Adlon Hotel.
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Tiergarten
Central urban park of 520 hectares, redesigned in the 1830s, 1880s in English landscape style, containing memorials, botanical gardens, and tree-lined pathways.
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Berlin Wall Memorial
Preserved 1.4-kilometre stretch of the original 1961 concrete barrier at East Side Gallery, now an open-air gallery with murals by international artists.
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Brandenburg Gate
An 18th-century neoclassical arch and symbol of German reunification, designed by Carl Gotthard Langhans and completed in 1791.
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Museum Island
UNESCO World Heritage site comprising five state museums, the Pergamon Museum, Neues Museum, Altes Museum, Bode Museum, and Alte Nationalgalerie, housing antiquities, Egyptian treasures, and European art from medieval to 19th-century periods.
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Reichstag Building
Seat of the German Parliament, built 1884, 1894 and redesigned by Norman Foster post-reunification with a glass dome offering 360-degree city views.
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Alexanderplatz
Named for a visiting tsar in 1805, flattened in the war and rebuilt by East Germany as a socialist showpiece of concrete slabs, a world clock listing time zones and a fountain of friendship between peoples. It remains the transport hub of the east and is loud, worn and completely unlike the restored centre nearby.
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Berliner Dom
A green copper dome over a Protestant cathedral of 1905, built at imperial scale to answer St Peter's and half destroyed in 1944. Ninety-four Hohenzollern coffins sit in the crypt, from infants to the first Prussian king. Two hundred and seventy steps reach a gallery around the dome with the museum island directly below.
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Berliner Fernsehturm
Three hundred and sixty-eight metres of East German television mast, finished in 1969 and still the tallest structure in the country. Sunlight on the sphere throws a cross onto the tiles, which West Berliners enjoyed pointing out to a state that had no use for one. A lift reaches the viewing deck in forty seconds; book a slot.
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Berliner Philharmonie
Hans Scharoun put the orchestra in the middle and the audience in terraced vineyards around it in 1963, which nobody had done and most halls have copied since. The gold tent roof was a West Berlin statement built hard against the wall. Free lunchtime concerts run in the foyer on Tuesdays in season.
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Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas
Two thousand seven hundred and eleven concrete slabs on nineteen thousand square metres of undulating ground beside the Brandenburg Gate, by Peter Eisenman, with no names, no inscription and no stated meaning. Walking into the middle puts the city out of sight and hearing. An information centre underneath gives the names it deliberately omits.
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East Side Gallery
One thousand three hundred metres of the wall's eastern side along the Spree, painted by one hundred and eighteen artists in 1990 and repainted since, including the Brezhnev and Honecker kiss. It is the longest surviving stretch. Development has taken bites out of it and the section by the river is the intact one.
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Hamburger Bahnhof
A railway terminus of 1847 that stopped taking trains in 1884 and became the contemporary art museum in 1996, its platform hall long enough for work at any scale. Beuys, Warhol, Kiefer and Rauschenberg anchor the collection. The facade is washed in green light after dark by Dan Flavin.
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Jüdisches Museum
Daniel Libeskind's zinc-clad building of 1999, cut by voids and sloping floors that are the argument before a single object is shown, joined underground to a baroque courthouse holding the collection. Two thousand years of Jewish life in these lands is the subject, not only the twelve worst of them. The garden of stelae is outside.
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Neue Nationalgalerie
Mies van der Rohe's last building, finished in 1968: a steel roof on eight columns over a glass hall with the collection in the granite base beneath. Chipperfield dismantled and rebuilt it piece by piece between 2015 and 2021. Twentieth-century painting is downstairs, from Kirchner and Beckmann to Bacon.
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Neues Museum
A bombed shell left as a ruin for sixty years, then rebuilt by David Chipperfield in 2009 with the scars deliberately visible: new brick against old, blank patches where frescoes burned. Nefertiti's bust is here, alone in a domed room and photographed by nobody, because the ban is enforced. Egyptian and prehistoric collections fill the rest.
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Pergamonmuseum
The museum built around objects too large to move again: the Ishtar Gate of Babylon in glazed blue brick, the market gate of Miletus and the Pergamon altar itself. It closed completely in October 2023 for a rebuild expected to run into the 2030s, with the northern wing due back first. Check what has reopened before planning around it.
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Tempelhofer Feld
The airport that flew the Berlin airlift closed in 2008 and the city voted in 2014 against building a single house on it, so three hundred hectares of runway and grass sit open inside the ring railway. Cyclists, kite buggies and allotments use it. The terminal building is toured separately and is enormous.
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Topographie des Terrors
Built on the excavated cellars of the Gestapo headquarters and the SS command, with an outdoor exhibition running along the longest surviving inner-city stretch of wall. It documents the perpetrators rather than the victims, name by name and office by office. Free, open daily, and the outdoor panels stay accessible after the building closes.