Tiergarten Berlin: The Great Park at the City's Heart

Tiergarten is Berlin's largest and most beloved urban park — a vast expanse of 210 hectares of forest, lawns, and lakeside gardens running through the centre of the German capital from the Brandenburg Gate to Charlottenburg. The park began as a royal hunting ground in the 16th century before being redesigned as a public landscape in the 19th century and nearly completely destroyed by bombing and desperate fuel-seeking during and after World War II. The recovery of the park from bare earth to mature urban forest in just decades is one of Berlin's most remarkable regeneration stories.

The park's central position makes it the green corridor connecting many of Berlin's most significant monuments. The Victory Column (Siegessäule) rises from the park's Großer Stern roundabout, its golden angel offering panoramic views from the viewing platform 51 metres above the park's tree canopy. The Soviet War Memorial in the Tiergarten, one of three in Berlin, honours the Red Army soldiers who died in the Battle of Berlin in 1945 and is maintained as a functioning memorial with eternal flame. The park also houses the Berlin Zoo on its western edge — the most visited zoo in Germany and home to pandas, gorillas, and an extraordinary range of animals in historic enclosures.

Tiergarten is at its finest on summer weekends when Berliners claim the park's meadows for barbecues, football, sunbathing, and informal gatherings that turn the entire park into one enormous outdoor social space. Turkish families with elaborate charcoal grills, students with beer and speakers, cyclists, rollerbladers, and joggers coexist in the relaxed Berlin way that accepts all uses of public space without hierarchy. The Café am Neuen See in the park's western section offers beer garden seating on a lakeside terrace that on a warm evening is one of the most pleasant places to sit in the entire city.