A collectively run club with politics woven into its DNA, about blank stands apart from Berlin's commercial nightlife. Opened in 2010 on Markgrafendamm near Ostkreuz, it is operated as a non-hierarchical project that channels proceeds into leftist, anti-fascist and queer causes. Spread across two indoor floors and a much-loved garden, it offers one of the city's most charming open-air dancing experiences in summer. Its programming runs the gamut of house and techno, with a strong commitment to.....

Alexanderplatz, a vast public square in the centre of the former East Berlin, is one of the busiest and most recognisable open spaces in the German capital, named after the Russian Tsar Alexander the First, who visited the city in 1805. Long a focus of trade and transport, the square developed over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a bustling commercial hub, immortalised in literature as a symbol of the teeming modern metropolis, before suffering heavy damage in the Second World .....

Facing the great park known as the Lustgarten on Museum Island in Berlin, the Altes Museum, or Old Museum, is a masterpiece of neoclassical architecture and the oldest of the five museums on the island, a building whose design has been admired and imitated for nearly two centuries. Completed in 1830 to designs by the celebrated architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the museum was among the first purpose-built public museums in the German lands, conceived to bring the royal collections of art and an.....

A converted barge moored in the River Spree in the Treptow district of Berlin, the Badeschiff is one of the city's most distinctive summer attractions, an open-air swimming pool floating on the water itself, surrounded by a popular beach bar and sun decks. The name translates roughly as bathing ship, and the concept arose in the mid-2000s as an inventive response to the wish to swim safely in the heart of a city whose own river is not suitable for bathing: rather than swim in the Spree, visitors.....

A dignified square along the grand boulevard of Unter den Linden in central Berlin, Bebelplatz is ringed by handsome buildings of the eighteenth century yet is remembered above all as the site of one of the most notorious episodes of the Nazi era. The square was laid out in the mid-eighteenth century as part of an ambitious royal scheme to create a forum of culture and learning, and it is bordered by the state opera house, the domed Catholic cathedral of Saint Hedwig and a wing of the old royal .....

Bellevue Palace, set in parkland beside the River Spree at the edge of the great Tiergarten park in Berlin, is the official residence of the President of Germany and one of the city's most elegant neoclassical buildings. The palace was built in 1786 for a younger brother of the Prussian king Frederick the Great, designed in the early neoclassical style with a graceful white facade, and it takes its name, meaning beautiful view, from the pleasant outlook it once enjoyed over the river and gardens.....

Widely regarded as the most famous techno club on earth, Berghain occupies a hulking former power station in the no-man's-land between Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg. Opened in 2004 by Norbert Thormann and Michael Teufele, the founders of the earlier gay club Ostgut, it turned an imposing slab of GDR-era industrial architecture into a cathedral of electronic music. Its cavernous main floor pounds with relentless techno beneath towering ceilings and a thunderous Funktion-One sound system, while th.....

Live actors, theatrical sets, special effects and short underground rides combine at the Berlin Dungeon to dramatise roughly 800 years of the city's darker past. Guests are led on an approximately 70-minute walk-through by costumed performers who play executioners, plague doctors, grave robbers and other unsavoury figures pulled from Berlin folklore and genuine historical episodes. The attraction sits on Spandauer Strasse, a short walk from Alexanderplatz, and belongs to an international family.....

Everything inside the Berlin Icebar is carved from ice, right down to the glass each drink is served in, and the whole room is held at a constant minus ten degrees Celsius. Just off Alexanderplatz on Spandauer Strasse, the bar dresses its visit up as a themed polar expedition: guests step first into a heated nineteenth-century tavern modelled on a Bremerhaven dockside inn, receive a so-called Seaman's Book, and are then kitted out with thermal capes and gloves before boarding the imaginary explo.....

The Berlin TV Tower, or Fernsehturm, rises 368 metres above Alexanderplatz and remains the tallest publicly accessible structure in Germany, visible from almost every corner of the city. Built between 1965 and 1969 by the East German state and inaugurated on 3 October 1969, it was conceived as a broadcasting facility and a showpiece of socialist engineering, championed by GDR leader Walter Ulbricht. Its design, a slender concrete shaft topped by a steel sphere, was the work of a team including a.....