Berlin, Germany

Self-guided audio walking tour of Berlin

50 hand-checked places and 2 walking routes. aiGuide notices where you are and tells you each place's story as you walk past, so you can keep your phone in your pocket.

Brandenburg to Museum Island

10 stops · about 90 min · 3.2 km

The most rewarding 90 minutes in central Berlin, tracing the ceremonial axis from the Reichstag and Brandenburg Gate past the great national memorials to the museums and cathedral of Museum Island.

1. 1.Reichstag

   Late 19th century (Wilhelmine Imperial), with late-20th-century restoration

   Seat of the German Bundestag - Paul Wallot's 1894 Renaissance pile crowned by Norman Foster's glass dome, where visitors walk above their elected representatives.

2. 2.Brandenburger Tor

   Late 18th century (Prussian Neoclassicism)

   Neoclassical sandstone triumphal arch crowned by the Quadriga chariot - once the Cold War's most photographed Wall backdrop, now Berlin's reunification icon.

3. 3.Denkmal fur die im Nationalsozialismus ermordeten Sinti und Roma Europas

   Contemporary memorial culture (2010s)

   Circular dark pool by Dani Karavan with a retractable stone at its centre, dedicated 24 October 2012. Commemorates the Sinti and Roma murdered in the Porajmos.

4. 4.Denkmal fur die ermordeten Juden Europas

   Contemporary memorial culture (21st century)

   A field of 2,711 concrete stelae across 19,000 square metres in central Berlin, commemorating the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Designed by Peter Eisenman, inaugurated 10 May 2005.

5. 5.Denkmal fur die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen

   Contemporary memorial culture (2000s)

   A single tilted concrete stele on the edge of the Tiergarten, dedicated 27 May 2008. A window shows a looping film of a same-sex kiss.

6. 6.Gendarmenmarkt

   Late 17th to 19th century (Baroque to Neoclassical)

   Berlin's most architecturally satisfying square - two near-mirror-image domed churches flanking Schinkel's Konzerthaus, with a Schiller statue at the centre.

7. 7.Berliner Dom

   Wilhelmine Imperial era (late 19th-early 20th century)

   Wilhelmine high-baroque Protestant cathedral with a 75-metre central dome - the dynastic church of the Hohenzollerns, rebuilt after wartime collapse.

8. 8.Altes Museum

   Early 19th century (Prussian Neoclassicism)

   Karl Friedrich Schinkel's 1830 neoclassical masterpiece - the founding building of Museum Island and an icon of Prussian Greek Revival architecture.

9. 9.Neues Museum

   Mid-19th-century museum building with 21st-century restoration

   Home of the Nefertiti bust - Friedrich August Stuler's 1855 museum was a bombed-out ruin for sixty years before David Chipperfield's celebrated 2009 restoration.

10. 10.Pergamonmuseum

    Weimar-era museum housing ancient Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern collections

    Museum Island's archaeology blockbuster - home to the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, the Market Gate of Miletus, and the namesake Pergamon Altar.

Wall walk: Bernauer Strasse to Brandenburg Gate

8 stops · about 90 min · 5.0 km

A 90-minute walk through the Cold War heart of Berlin, from the preserved death strip at Bernauer Strasse south past the Friedrichstrasse and Checkpoint Charlie crossings, the Topography of Terror, and on to the Holocaust Memorial and Brandenburg Gate.

1. 1.Gedenkstatte Berliner Mauer

   Cold War, 1961-1989; memorial opened 1998

   Central memorial to the Berlin Wall on Bernauer Strasse, preserving a sixty-metre section of the border strip with watchtower, death strip and the Window of Remembrance.

2. 2.Tranenpalast

   Cold War, 1962-1990; museum since 2011

   Glass and steel departure hall at Friedrichstrasse station built in 1962, where East Germans bid farewell to Western visitors crossing back through the Wall, now a free museum of division.

3. 3.Checkpoint Charlie

   Cold War, 1961-1990

   Best-known Cold War crossing point on the Berlin Wall, operating on Friedrichstrasse from 1961 to 1990 as the only checkpoint for foreign diplomats and Allied personnel.

4. 4.Topographie des Terrors

   Third Reich, 1933-1945; Berlin Wall, 1961-1989

   Documentation centre on the site of the Gestapo, SS Reich Security Main Office and SD headquarters during the Third Reich, beside one of the longest surviving stretches of the Berlin Wall.

5. 5.Anhalter Bahnhof

   Wilhelmine, ruined in WWII

   Fragment of the 1880 portico is all that survives of Franz Schwechten's grand southern terminus, bombed in 1943-45, used as a deportation point for Berlin's Jews, demolished 1960.

6. 6.Denkmal fur die ermordeten Juden Europas

   Contemporary memorial culture (21st century)

   A field of 2,711 concrete stelae across 19,000 square metres in central Berlin, commemorating the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Designed by Peter Eisenman, inaugurated 10 May 2005.

7. 7.Denkmal fur die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen

   Contemporary memorial culture (2000s)

   A single tilted concrete stele on the edge of the Tiergarten, dedicated 27 May 2008. A window shows a looping film of a same-sex kiss.

8. 8.Brandenburger Tor

   Late 18th century (Prussian Neoclassicism)

   Neoclassical sandstone triumphal arch crowned by the Quadriga chariot - once the Cold War's most photographed Wall backdrop, now Berlin's reunification icon.

More must-see places in Berlin

• East Side Gallery

  Cold War, 1961-1989; gallery painted 1990

  The longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall, 1,316 metres along the Spree, painted in 1990 by 118 artists from twenty-one countries into an open-air gallery.

• Berliner Fernsehturm

  East German modernism (1960s)

  Berlin's 368-metre television tower at Alexanderplatz, completed 3 October 1969 as an East German prestige project. The tallest structure in Germany.