The 11 things not to miss in Berlin

The Brandenburg Gate closes the western end of Unter den Linden on Pariser Platz. Carl Gotthard Langhans built it between 1788 and 1791 on the model of the Propylaea of the Acropolis: twelve Doric columns forming five passages, the central one once reserved for the royal family, topped by the Quadriga of the goddess of victory that Napoleon carried off to Paris in 1806 and Prussia brought back in 1814.

For 28 years the gate stood in the no man's land of the Wall, out of reach of both East and West Berliners. Since the reunification celebrations of 1989-1990 it has become the country's symbol of unity, the backdrop for New Year's Eve and for every major public gathering. Pariser Platz, rebuilt around it, holds the Hotel Adlon, the French and US embassies and the Academy of Arts.

The Reichstag building, completed in 1894 for the parliament of the German Empire, was gutted by the fire of 1933, shelled in 1945 and left half-abandoned beside the Wall for decades. After reunification Norman Foster rebuilt it for the Bundestag, keeping the Soviet soldiers' graffiti on the inner walls and crowning it with the glass dome that has become the symbol of the German parliament since 1999.

Visitors walk up the spiral ramp inside the dome while an audio guide, triggered automatically as you climb, points out the Tiergarten, the Chancellery, the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz. Through the funnel of mirrors at the centre you look straight down into the plenary chamber. The roof terrace is open at the same time and the Käfer restaurant up there takes separate bookings.

Museum Island occupies the northern tip of the Spree island in Mitte, and its five museums, built between 1830 and 1930, have been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1999. The Altes Museum, Schinkel's colonnaded temple facing the Lustgarten, holds Greek and Roman antiquities. Behind it, the Neues Museum, rebuilt by David Chipperfield and reopened in 2009, shows the Egyptian collection and the bust of Nefertiti. The Alte Nationalgalerie covers 19th-century painting from Caspar David Friedrich to the Impressionists, and the Bode Museum at the northern point houses sculpture, Byzantine art and coins.

The fifth museum, the Pergamonmuseum, is closed for a complete renovation: its north wing with the Ishtar Gate and the Market Gate of Miletus is announced for 2027, the rest later. Until then, the Pergamon Altar frieze can be seen in the temporary "Das Panorama" building opposite the island, and the James Simon Gallery serves as the entrance and ticket hall for the whole site.

The Berlin Wall Memorial stretches for 1.4 km along Bernauer Strasse, the street where the border ran right along the house fronts in 1961: residents jumped from windows into the West while the ground floors were bricked up. It is the only place in the city where a section of the border strip survives in full, with the two walls, the patrol road, a watchtower and the sand of the death strip.

The open-air exhibition explains the layout with photographs, sound stations and the marked outline of the demolished Church of Reconciliation, replaced by a small chapel. The Documentation Centre across the road has a viewing platform that looks down on the preserved strip, the clearest way to grasp how the Wall actually worked. The Window of Remembrance lists the people who died trying to cross here.

A block south of the Brandenburg Gate, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe covers 19,000 m² with 2,711 concrete stelae of varying heights, laid out on undulating ground by the architect Peter Eisenman and inaugurated in 2005. Walking into the grid, the slabs rise above head height, the noise of the city fades and the visitor is left alone with the disorientation the design intends.

Beneath the field, the Information Centre presents the history of the persecution and murder of Europe's Jews through family stories, letters and the Room of Names, where the names and short biographies of victims are read aloud one after another. Nearby, along the Tiergarten, stand the memorials to the murdered Sinti and Roma, to homosexuals persecuted under Nazism and to the victims of the "euthanasia" killings.

The East Side Gallery is a 1,316-metre stretch of the former Berlin Wall along Mühlenstrasse in Friedrichshain, turned into the longest open-air gallery in the world. In the spring of 1990, shortly after the Wall fell, 118 artists from 21 countries painted more than a hundred murals on its eastern face, making the once-deadly barrier a canvas for freedom.

Its most famous images are instantly recognisable: Dmitri Vrubel's "Fraternal Kiss" of Brezhnev and Honecker, and Birgit Kinder's Trabant car bursting through the concrete. The free, open-air stretch runs beside the Spree between the Oberbaum Bridge and Ostbahnhof.

As one of Berlin's most photographed sites, it can get crowded by midday. Walking the full length takes about 30-45 minutes and pairs naturally with the riverside bars and the Friedrichshain nightlife nearby.

Berlin Cathedral rises over the Lustgarten at the edge of Museum Island, a neo-baroque mass of sandstone finished in 1905 for Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wanted a Protestant answer to St Peter's. Inside, the main nave under the 98 m dome is all marble, gilded mosaics and the great Sauer organ with more than 7,000 pipes; the building was badly damaged in 1944 and only fully restored in 1993.

Two things justify the ticket: the 270 steps up to the dome walkway, with a view over the Spree, the Fernsehturm and the museums, and the Hohenzollern crypt beneath the church, which reopened to the public on 1 March 2026 after a long restoration (berlinerdom.de). Its roughly one hundred coffins, from the 16th to the 20th century, are the largest dynastic burial place in Germany.

At 368 m the Fernsehturm on Alexanderplatz is the tallest structure in Germany, built by the GDR between 1965 and 1969 as a showcase of socialist modernity and visible from almost every district. The steel sphere near the top was designed to recall the Sputnik satellites; when the sun hits it, a cross of light appears on the surface, which West Berliners nicknamed "the Pope's revenge".

The lift climbs to the observation deck at 203 m in about 40 seconds. From there the whole layout of Berlin unfolds: the Spree, Museum Island and the cathedral at your feet, the Tiergarten and the Reichstag to the west, the plattenbau estates of the former East to the east. One floor up, the Sphere restaurant turns slowly on itself while you eat.

Checkpoint Charlie was the Allied crossing point on Friedrichstrasse, reserved for diplomats, foreigners and military personnel between the American and Soviet sectors. In October 1961, a few weeks after the Wall went up, American and Soviet tanks faced each other here for sixteen hours, the closest the two blocs came to a direct clash in Berlin. The name simply comes from the NATO alphabet: Alpha and Bravo were the checkpoints on the motorway from West Germany.

The original hut is at the Allied Museum in Dahlem; what stands on the street is a replica with its sandbags and the famous "You are leaving the American sector" sign. Around it, the outdoor gallery of the BlackBox Cold War exhibition and the private Mauermuseum (Haus am Checkpoint Charlie), open since 1963, tell the story of escapes in cars, tunnels and hot-air balloons.

Before the war Potsdamer Platz was the busiest crossroads in Europe, with the first traffic light on the continent; after 1945 it was a wasteland cut in two by the Wall, so empty that a viewing platform let West Berliners peer over into the East. In the 1990s it became the largest building site in Europe, and the towers of Renzo Piano, Helmut Jahn and Hans Kollhoff went up in under a decade.

Today the square is a district of offices, cinemas and shopping arcades around the tented roof of the Sony Center. A few original Wall segments stand at the S-Bahn exit, and the Panoramapunkt lift in the Kollhoff Tower, said to be the fastest in Europe, reaches a viewing deck at 100 m. The square hosts the Berlinale film festival every February.

The Tiergarten is Berlin's central park, 210 hectares of woods, lawns and lakes between the Brandenburg Gate and Zoo station. A royal hunting ground turned English-style park in the 19th century, it was almost entirely felled for firewood in the winters after 1945 and replanted from 1949; the mature trees you see today are barely seventy years old.

The Victory Column (Siegessäule) stands at its centre on the Grosser Stern roundabout, 285 steps up to a platform under the gilded statue. Around the park are Bellevue Palace, residence of the German president, the Soviet War Memorial on Strasse des 17. Juni, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and, on the southern edge, the Zoo and the Philharmonie. In summer Berliners barbecue on the lawns and row on the Neuer See.