In the heart of Hamburg, the Binnenalster, or Inner Alster, is the smaller of the two ornamental lakes formed when the River Alster was dammed for milling around the year 1250. The terms inner and outer refer to the city's long-gone medieval walls: the Binnenalster was the basin that lay inside them, while the much larger Aussenalster spreads out beyond, the two now separated by the Lombardsbruecke and Kennedybruecke bridges. Covering only about 0.2 square kilometres and nowhere much more than t.....

The Bucerius Kunst Forum is one of Hamburg's most respected exhibition houses, set directly beside the city's Rathaus on the Rathausmarkt and facing the Alsterfleet canal. It was founded in 2002 by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, the foundation named after the lawyer, publisher and co-founder of the weekly Die Zeit, with the explicit aim of supporting fine art on a lasting basis and opening it to a broad public. Rather than maintaining a fixed permanent collection, the forum stages a.....

In total darkness, guided only by the voice and confidence of a blind or visually impaired host, visitors to the Dialoghaus Hamburg cross a street, browse a market, walk in a park and order a drink, discovering how much of the world can be navigated without sight. This social enterprise in the Speicherstadt warehouse district, at Alter Wandrahm 4, turns the everyday tables: in its exhibitions the people usually cast as needing help become the experts and guides, while sighted guests must rely on.....

Consecrated in 1893, the Domkirche St. Marien is the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Hamburg and the first Catholic church built in the city since the Reformation, a striking neo-Romanesque landmark in the St. Georg district just east of the main railway station. For centuries after the reformer Johannes Bugenhagen drew up Hamburg's Protestant church order in 1529, public Catholic worship was banned in the city, and only in the nineteenth century did a growing Catholic community make a.....

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.....

Between 1850 and 1939, Hamburg was the gateway to the world for more than five million Europeans who passed through the port on their way to new lives, most of them bound for the United States, and the BallinStadt emigration museum tells their story at the very place from which they sailed. It stands on the Elbe island of Veddel, in three reconstructed buildings that recreate the emigrant halls built here from 1901 by Albert Ballin, the visionary director of the HAPAG shipping line. Faced with .....

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.....

Costumed actors, dark rides and theatrical special effects combine at the Hamburg Dungeon to turn six centuries of the city's grimmer history into an hour or so of scare-comedy entertainment. Set in the historic Speicherstadt warehouse district at Kehrwieder 2, beside the harbour, it is part of the international chain of Dungeon attractions run by Merlin Entertainments, the company behind Madame Tussauds and the Sea Life aquariums, and it opened in 2000. Visitors are led in groups through a ser.....