The largest park in Hamburg, the Altonaer Volkspark spreads across a great expanse of greenery in the west of the city, offering residents and visitors a vast and varied landscape for recreation and relaxation. Laid out in the early twentieth century as a people's park, in keeping with a movement of the era to provide generous public green spaces for the growing urban population, it was designed with a naturalistic character, combining broad meadows and lawns with extensive woodland, winding pat.....

Opened in 1911, the St. Pauli Elbtunnel, universally known as the Old Elbe Tunnel, was a marvel of its age and remains one of Hamburg's most atmospheric attractions, a tiled passage running 426 metres beneath the river some 24 metres down. It was built to give the tens of thousands of dock and shipyard workers a quick, all-weather route from the St. Pauli Landungsbruecken piers to the harbour and yards on the southern bank, replacing slow and crowded ferries. Construction began in 1907 under gre.....

The Elbphilharmonie has become the emblem of modern Hamburg, a glittering wave-crested concert hall rising from the harbour that draws visitors whether or not they ever hear a note of music. Designed by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, it sets a shimmering glass structure, evoking a hoisted sail, a wave or an iceberg, atop the solid brick mass of the Kaispeicher A, a 1960s warehouse on the tip of the HafenCity district. At 108 metres it is the tallest inhabited building in the city. T.....

On the northern bank of the Elbe, just west of Hamburg's harbour, a surprising ribbon of sand stretches for several kilometres past the old fishing village of Oevelgoenne and the suburb of Othmarschen, the city beach known to everyone as the Elbstrand. It is not a seaside resort but a working river shore, and that is precisely its charm: sunbathers and picnickers spread out on the sand within touching distance of one of Europe's busiest waterways, while vast container ships, tugs and ferries gli.....

On the Reeperbahn fringe in St. Pauli, Hamburg's famous red-light and nightlife quarter, the Erotic Art Museum has long offered a more cultured take on the district's reputation, presenting erotic art as a serious artistic theme rather than mere titillation. The original museum opened on 11 November 1992 at Bernhard-Nocht-Strasse 69, founded by Claus Becker with the backing of the city's cultural authorities and launched under the slogan that sex is not so bad, a deliberate attempt to bring an a.....

Handmade ice cream in inventive flavours, made on the premises from natural ingredients, has made Luicella's a much-loved Hamburg institution, and its branch on the Osterstrasse, in the lively Eimsbuettel district, is one of several the small local chain runs across the city. The business was founded by two enthusiasts determined to make ice cream the old-fashioned way, churning it fresh in the shop from real, regional ingredients rather than industrial mixes, with milk sourced from farms in the.....

A three-masted sailing ship of 1896, the Rickmer Rickmers is one of Hamburg's most photographed landmarks, her green hull and tall rigging moored permanently at the St. Pauli landing stages as a floating museum of the great age of sail. She was built at the Rickmers shipyard in Bremerhaven and named after the founder's grandson, launched as a sailing cargo vessel that carried rice and bamboo from Asia and saltpetre and other goods around Cape Horn from South America, trading under sail in the dy.....

The name means ropewalk, a reminder that ropes for sailing ships were once made along this stretch of Hamburg. Today the Reeperbahn is the heart of the city's nightlife in the St. Pauli district and its best-known red-light street, nicknamed the sinful mile. Rope makers settled here in 1626, when the trade was moved out beyond the city walls onto the country road towards Altona. For most of the 17th and 18th centuries this was a working ropewalk rather than a place of entertainment. As the nea.....

Panoptikum is the oldest and largest wax museum in Germany, a family-run institution on the Spielbudenplatz in Hamburg's St Pauli district, a short step from the bright lights of the Reeperbahn. It was founded in 1879 by Friedrich Hermann Faerber, at a time when wax figures gave the public a chance to see what famous people looked like before photography was widespread, mixing kings and criminals, public figures and curiosities in a display that was part spectacle and part visual newspaper. Rema.....