A weekend in Berlin
20 h route4 stopsBest: May to SeptemberUpdated July 2026
Saturday does the central axis (the gate, the Reichstag, Unter den Linden, the museums) and Sunday goes to what really sets this city apart: the wall told properly, and the eastern districts, where the people who give Berlin its reputation actually live.
And there’s a calendar detail worth knowing before organising anything: in Germany the shops close on Sundays, with almost no exceptions. Museums open, restaurants too. Shopping, no.
The route, stop by stop
4 STOPS- 01
Saturday: the central axis
Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag dome, registering online beforehand, the Holocaust memorial and Unter den Linden as far as Museum Island. With two days there’s time to properly go into the Neues Museum to see Nefertiti, instead of walking past.
- 02
Saturday afternoon: Bernauer Straße
The East Side Gallery takes the photographs and the metres, but the wall is understood here. At Bernauer Straße a section is preserved with both barriers, the raked sand strip between them, the watchtower and the lights: it wasn’t a wall, it was a system tens of metres deep.
This street was also the setting for the best-known images of 1961: the houses stood in the east and the pavement in the west, so people jumped from the windows until they were bricked up.
There’s a free documentation centre and a chapel of reconciliation built where a church stood that the regime dynamited in 1985 for obstructing the sightlines.
- 03
Sunday: the East Side Gallery and Friedrichshain
The East Side Gallery holds up 1.3 kilometres along the Spree, painted in 1990 by more than a hundred artists from some twenty countries as soon as the regime fell. The most famous mural is the kiss between Brezhnev and Honecker, copied from a real photograph from 1979.
Behind it is Friedrichshain, one of the districts that best tells recent Berlin: monumental socialist blocks along Karl-Marx-Allee, bars at street level, and the contrast with Kreuzberg just across the river, joined by the Oberbaum bridge, which was a border crossing.
- 04
Sunday afternoon: Tempelhofer Feld
Tempelhof airport closed in 2008 and instead of building on it they opened it as a park, leaving the two runways exactly as they were. Today people skate, cycle and land-kite where the planes used to touch down, with the Nazi terminal from the thirties (vast, among the largest structures built in that period) closing the far end. In 2014 a citizens’ referendum banned building anything there, against the regional government’s wishes: Berliners voted to leave a plot the size of Central Park empty in the middle of the city. It says a great deal about how Berlin works.
Frequently asked
Where do you best see the Berlin Wall?
At Bernauer Straße, the only place preserving the border’s full depth with both fences, the raked sand strip and a watchtower. The East Side Gallery is the longest and most photogenic stretch, but it’s a single painted wall: it doesn’t explain how the thing worked.
Do shops open on Sunday in Berlin?
No, with very few exceptions. In Germany retail closes on Sundays by law. Museums, restaurants, cafés and the shops in the big stations and the airport do open. For basics there are the Spätis, the corner shops that stay open late and on holidays too.