City trip to Hamburg: Six highlights in Germany’s most beautiful port city
From sexy and bizarre to historic and hip to creative and cool: Hamburg is one of the must-see cities in Germany and one of the most beautiful. We show why a visit to the port city is so pleasant and exciting at the same time – even without a visit to the Reeperbahn.
The one with one
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What Hamburg is all about: With 2,500 bridges, it is the city with the most bridges in Europe. Not even Venice can keep up. A city-state, both city and state. A Hanseatic city. With almost 1.9 million inhabitants, it is the second largest city in the republic – and so many friendly, relaxed people. Proud owner of the largest port in Germany. Ocean liners sail in and out here, 40 theaters, 60 museums, 100 clubs and impressive buildings offer art and culture at its best. You have to be here once in your life. Better yet: several times. A short foray with practical tips through the well-known and lesser-known highlights of the city.
1. Town Hall: Magnificent building in a magnificent location
Would you rather start with green (the many parks), blue (the many waters) or red? We choose the latter color – for the heart of the city. This happens at the Rathausmarkt, a huge square on the Binnenalster where the town hall sits. The imposing sandstone building with its 112 meter high tower (great viewing point!) shines in red and orange tones – built at the end of the 19th century in the historicist style of the North German Renaissance.
Just looking at its magnificent, 111-meter-long facade gives you an idea of what’s going on inside. Here, the parliament (called the citizenry) and the government (called the Senate) work under one roof. If you want to know more, you can visit the magnificent festival hall and tower hall. There is a lot to discover around the building: the elegant Alster arcades, the outside staircase, Mönckebergstrasse with its magnificent buildings and the historic Jungfernstieg promenade as well as many restaurants and cafés.
2. Art Mile: 5 museums for one ticket
Just a few steps further in the center there is a lot of art for little money: the merger of the Kunsthalle, the Museum of Arts and Crafts, the Bucerius Art Forum, the Deichtorhallen and the Art Association may sound overwhelming at first. But the great density of five museums over a distance of just 1.5 kilometers offers the unique opportunity to cater to many tastes at the same time.
The Kunsthalle alone – consisting of a historic and a modern building – has treasures from more than seven centuries with a focus on German Romanticism and classical modernism. Works by impressionists such as Caspar David Friedrich or Max Beckmann and Paul Klee make it one of the largest and most important art collections in Germany.
3. Harbor tour: The trick with the ferry
Hamburg’s maritime flair can be experienced nowhere better than at the Landungsbrücken. A wide variety of harbor tours are offered here – on barges with beer, food or parties. If you don’t need that, you can also experience an exciting harbor tour with the cheapest option. The public ferry, line 62 towards Finkenwerder, sails past the most important sights on the Hamburg harbor edge many times a day.
These include the fish auction hall, the dockland, the Oevelgönne museum harbor, the Elbe beach and the villas behind it. Going there and back at sunset, for example, is a fantastic experience when the harbor crows and skyline are bathed in orange tones and the Elbphilharmonie sparkles. Back at the landing stages, small stalls with the local specialty fish rolls await you. Plus some Alster water and the view of the harbor and ships – a pleasure!
4. Elbphilharmonie: Landmark and madness
We continue in the Hafencity: At the eastern tip, Hamburg’s new landmark floats like a wave above the listed brick Kaiserspeicher – the Elbphilharmonie, known as “Elphi” for short. Even before its opening at the beginning of 2017, everyone was talking about the glass architectural marvel by the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron (who also built Munich’s Allianz Arena) with its wave-shaped roof. Less because it should be a place of culture for everyone with affordable ticket prices starting at ten euros. But because of its construction costs, which have exploded elevenfold, amounting to 865 million euros. If you want to know more about the controversial construction project, for example what Apartments in the “Elphi”, how the 1,100 window elements made of quadruple safety glass were tested and why the large concert hall with its clear-as-a-bell acoustics sounds like one of the best in the world, take a guided tour. Absolutely worth it!
Experiencing the miracle of sound with your own ears is often quicker than expected, as there are almost always returned tickets at the box office. But anyone can visit the “Elphi” even without an opera or concert ticket. With free Plaza tickets you can take the world’s only curved escalator, which you can’t see the end of when you step on it, up to the observation deck at a height of 37 meters. The so-called Plaza runs around the entire building and offers fantastic views of the harbor, the Elbe and the entire city at any time of day.
5. Speicherstadt: Where coffee, cocoa, tea and Brazil nuts were stored
Just a few steps further is the next marvel: the Speicherstadt. The largest historical warehouse complex in the world has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2015 (along with the Kontorhausviertel). From the end of the 19th century, the 15 red brick buildings with their bay windows, decorative gables and sandstone ornaments served as storage locations for goods from all over the world such as coffee, cocoa, tea, pepper and Brazil nuts.
They can still be reached today via countless canals and bridges. Since the advent of container shipping, they are no longer used for storage, but are instead used as cafés, restaurants, offices, studios and museums. Are you looking for captivating aromas, taste tests and the little-known healing powers of pepper, saffron and nutmeg? Then Spicy’s Spice Museum is the right place. In the small museum in the Speicherstadt the motto is: smell, taste, touch!
6. L’ Apotheque: What historical sex toys are all about
The door of the listed pharmacy from 1799 creaks open – and Anna is standing there. With bright eyes, short, blonde hair, in a green mini dress and cowboy boots. Small but mighty, that not only fits the studied art historian and dancer, but also Germany’s first museum for historical sex toys. When she inherited St. Pauli’s oldest pharmacy and didn’t know what to do with it, the idea of opening a museum for sex toys came up – after all, Anna grew up in St. Pauli.
With the Hamburg cultural scientist Dr. Nadine Beck, who researched and collected vibrators, opened the small private museum in October 2022. In keeping with the motto “humorous and sophisticated”, the first electrical devices are shown from 1869 onwards, which are more similar to hair dryers. Between apothecary bottles there are GDR spin dryers, vibrators connected to smartphone apps, Japanese Hello Kitty models and medieval cock rings woven from natural fibers. Anna eloquently combines all of this with the typical complexes of women, body positivity, hard stories from the neighborhood and facts such as the long existence of the matchmaking paragraph in Germany. Until 1969.