Berlin Walking Shore Excursion from Warnemünde

Meeting by the ship

Meeting by the ship. The start time of the tour is given approximately and will be adjusted depending on your ship arrival time. The exact meeting time will be specified on your confirmation letter.

Drive to Berlin

Three hours south by shared coach through the lake country of northern Germany

Charlottenburg Palace

You meet your guide beside Charlottenburg Palace, the baroque summer residence begun in 1699 for Sophie Charlotte, the first queen in Prussia, and get your bearings in the city.

West Berlin on foot

The western districts, held by the British and Americans while the city was divided. You pass along the Kurfürstendamm, the shopping boulevard that was West Berlin's answer to the east, the KaDeWe department store of 1907, still the largest in continental Europe, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, whose bombed tower was deliberately left broken in 1943 condition as a war memorial.

Train to the centre

A ride on the S-Bahn to the main station, then a walk to the government quarter, which is the quickest way across Berlin and a look at the city off the tourist route.

Reichstag

The Reichstag, opened in 1894, burned in 1933, fought over street by street in 1945 and rebuilt for the reunified parliament by Norman Foster, who set a glass dome over the chamber in 1999 so that voters can walk above their politicians.

Brandenburg Gate

The walk through the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate, built in 1791 as a city gate and crowned by the Quadriga, the chariot Napoleon carried off to Paris and the Prussians took back. It stood in the death strip between the walls from 1961 to 1989 and became the picture of the city's division and then of its reunion. Pariser Platz opens out behind it.

Potsdamer Platz

Potsdamer Platz, the busiest square in Europe before the war, flattened by bombing and then cut in two by the Wall, which left it an empty field for thirty years. Everything standing there now went up in the 1990s, including the Sony Center under its tented roof.

The Wall and the Topography of Terror

Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing between the American and Soviet sectors where Soviet and American tanks faced each other at a hundred metres in October 1961, and the Topography of Terror a few minutes away, the site of the Gestapo and SS headquarters, now an open-air exhibition running along one of the longest surviving stretches of the Berlin Wall.

Free time for lunch

An hour of your own near Checkpoint Charlie, lunch not included

Friedrichstraße and Gendarmenmarkt

A walk up Friedrichstraße through the former Soviet sector to Gendarmenmarkt, the square of the German and French cathedrals and the concert hall, and on to Bebelplatz.

Unter den Linden and Museum Island

Unter den Linden and the historic centre: Humboldt University, whose graduates include Einstein and the Brothers Grimm, and Bebelplatz opposite, where students burned twenty thousand books in May 1933 and a window in the pavement now looks down on empty white shelves. Nearby stand the Neue Wache, the memorial to the victims of war and tyranny with Käthe Kollwitz's pietà alone in an empty room, and Gendarmenmarkt, the square of the German and French cathedrals and the concert hall. Museum Island, five great museums on one island in the Spree and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999: the Altes Museum, the Neues Museum with the bust of Nefertiti, the Pergamon, the Old National Gallery and the Bode. Beside them stand Berlin Cathedral of 1905 and the Humboldt Forum, opened in 2020 behind a rebuilt baroque palace facade.

Drive back to the ship

The underground takes you back to Charlottenburg for the coach, which reaches the ship in the evening