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CITY GUIDE / 43 discovery ideas
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Hamburg.
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Search this city by topic →Stand on the floating Landungsbrücken pontoons
The whole pier row floats and rises with the tide on its own pontoons. Stand at the water rail as the harbour ferries dock, and photograph the piers.
Step into the courtyard of Hamburg City Hall
The 1897 neo-Renaissance Rathaus has more rooms than Buckingham Palace and rests on thousands of oak piles. Walk into its arcaded inner courtyard by the fountain — and photograph it.
Take a harbour tour among the container giants
A barge tour threads between dry docks, quay cranes and container ships tall as apartment blocks, then slips into the narrow Speicherstadt canals. Ride one — and photograph it.
Walk under the Elbe through the 1911 Old Elbe Tunnel
Take the wooden-panelled lift 24 metres down and walk the 426-metre tiled tube beneath the river, past its ceramic reliefs of harbour creatures — and photograph it.
Climb the Michel tower for the harbour view
Hamburg's baroque landmark church, the Michel, opens a viewing platform partway up its 132-metre tower. Look out over the whole harbour bend of the Elbe — and photograph it.
Take a boat out on the Outer Alster lake
The Außenalster is a city-centre lake wide enough for sailing dinghies. Rent a pedalo or take the Alster steamer, and photograph the skyline of spires from the water.
Find the Wasserschloss from Poggenmühlen bridge
From this one bridge the little turreted warehouse sits framed between two canals, and after dark the whole row lights up in the water. Stand at the rail — and photograph it.
Visit Hagenbeck, the zoo that removed the bars
Carl Hagenbeck opened this park in 1907 with moats instead of cages, inventing the open panorama enclosure copied by zoos worldwide. Find a moat-edge panorama — and photograph it.
Catch a water-light concert at Planten un Blomen
On summer evenings the park's lake stages a free water-light concert: fountains choreographed to music and coloured light. Take a bench by the water — and photograph it.
Find the ship's-prow corner of the Chilehaus
Fritz Höger's 1924 brick expressionist block narrows to a sharp corner that reads exactly like the bow of a ship. Stand where the two streets meet — and photograph it.
Ride the public ferry as a harbour cruise
Line 62 is an ordinary city ferry on an ordinary transit ticket, and it runs the same water as the paid harbour tours, down past the docks to Finkenwerder. Take the open back deck — and photograph it.
Cross the bridge between old and new at the Kunsthalle
The Hamburger Kunsthalle runs from medieval altarpieces to Caspar David Friedrich's wanderer and on into a white modern cube. Walk the whole arc in one visit — and photograph it.
Descend the staircase quarter of Blankenese
This old fishing village on the Elbe hillside has almost no through roads — thousands of steps thread between the houses down to the river instead. Take a stairway to the bottom — and photograph it.
Tour the canal-laced warehouse district of Speicherstadt (UNESCO)
Walk among the neo-Gothic brick warehouses standing on oak piles over the canals of the world's largest historic warehouse complex — and photograph it.
Sit on the Elbe beach as the container ships pass
At Övelgönne the city has a real sand beach, and ocean freighters slide by close enough to read their names. Sit down with the sand underfoot — and photograph a passing ship.
Climb the planted roof of the Feldstrasse bunker
A vast wartime flak tower has had five green storeys built on top of it, with a public switchback path of trees and shrubs climbing the outside to a roof garden. Walk it up — and photograph it.
Eat a warm Franzbrötchen straight from the bakery
Hamburg's own pastry: a flattened, caramelised cinnamon roll that exists almost nowhere else in Germany. Buy one still warm — and photograph it.
Climb nine decks of the Maritime Museum
An old Speicherstadt warehouse was gutted and refilled with nine floors numbered like a ship''s decks, from bone-carved prisoner models to the modern container trade. Work up through them — and photograph it.
Spend an evening in the Schanzenviertel
Sternschanze is Hamburg's scruffy-creative quarter: street art, second-hand shops, tiny kitchens from a dozen countries and a water tower turned hotel. Walk it after dark — and photograph it.
Go inside the Soviet submarine U-434
A Cold War spy submarine is tied up at the Fischmarkt quay with its torpedo tubes and cramped bunks left as they were. Squeeze the length of it — and photograph it.
Ride the lift up the ruined St. Nikolai tower
Bombed in 1943 and deliberately left as a ruin, the church's surviving spire now carries a glass lift to a platform 76 metres up over the shell below. Go up — and photograph it.
Order Labskaus, the sailor's plate
Beetroot-pink mashed beef and potato, crowned with a fried egg, a rollmops herring and a gherkin — food invented for long voyages with no teeth required. Order a plate — and photograph it.
Board the tall ship Rickmer Rickmers
The green three-masted barque at the Landungsbrücken sailed cargo under sail in the 1890s and is now open from hold to rigging. Stand at her wheel — and photograph it.
Walk Deichstraße, the oldest street left standing
These gabled merchant houses on the Nikolaifleet canal are the last of old Hamburg — the Great Fire of 1842 began on this very street. Walk it to the canal side — and photograph it.
Ride the big wheel at the Hamburger DOM
Northern Germany's biggest funfair takes over the Heiligengeistfeld three times a year. Ride the Ferris wheel at dusk for the lit-up city — and photograph it.
Board the Peking, the last of the Flying P-Liners
This four-masted steel barque rounded Cape Horn under sail, spent decades rusting in New York, and was towed home to Hamburg and rebuilt. Walk her deck — and photograph it.
Drink a coffee roasted inside the Speicherstadt
Coffee has been stored in these brick warehouses for over a century, and one of them still roasts it on site over an open drum. Drink a cup where it was roasted — and photograph it.
Eat a fish sandwich at the Sunday Fischmarkt
Eat a fresh fish sandwich (Fischbrötchen) among the bellowing market criers at the historic harbour fish market that opens at dawn — and photograph it.
Take the Altona balcony over the harbour
A grass terrace on the bluff above the river gives the whole working harbour at once: cranes, docks and the ships coming up the Elbe. Sit on the edge — and photograph it.
Ride through the orchards in blossom week
Just across the river lies northern Europe''s largest fruit-growing region, and for two weeks in spring the whole dyke road runs between walls of white blossom. Cycle a stretch — and photograph it.
Get lost in the world''s largest park cemetery
Ohlsdorf is so large it has its own bus routes and named avenues, laid out as parkland with ponds, sculpture and rhododendron walks between the graves. Find a quiet avenue — and photograph it.
Follow the Alster upstream out of the city
A footpath leaves the lake and follows the little river north through canals, boathouses and willow banks until the city quietly turns into countryside. Walk a stretch — and photograph it.
See photography in the old market halls
Two glass-and-steel market halls from 1914 now hold one of Europe''s largest exhibition spaces for contemporary art and photography. Take in a show — and photograph the hall.
Tour Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg (world's largest model railway)
Tour the world's largest model railway universe, recreating whole countries, a working airport and a full day-night cycle — and photograph it.
Walk into the saved alleys of the Gaengeviertel
The last block of Hamburg''s old alley quarter was about to be sold and demolished when artists occupied it; it is now studios, murals and a bar behind the office towers. Walk in — and photograph it.
Watch the Alster swans moved to winter quarters
The city has kept swans on the Alster since the seventeenth century, and every autumn a swan-father rounds them up by boat and ferries them to a sheltered pond. Catch the day — and photograph it.
Cross Jenischpark to the river bluff
An English landscape park of enormous solitary oaks runs from a white classical villa down to the Elbe, and almost nobody outside the neighbourhood uses it. Cross it to the water — and photograph it.
Step into the Krameramtsstuben courtyard
Behind the Michel a gate opens on a lane of tiny half-timbered houses built in the 1620s as almshouses for shopkeepers'' widows, barely two metres apart. Walk between them — and photograph it.
Meet the wax figures at the Panoptikum
Germany''s oldest waxworks has been standing on the Spielbudenplatz since 1879, still family-run and still modelling heads by hand. Find one that fools you — and photograph it.
Find the inland sand dunes inside Hamburg
Out east the ground turns to open sand: a genuine inland dune left by the last ice age, with gliders overhead and lizards in the heath. Stand on the crest — and photograph it.
Reach the little lighthouse on the Elbe beach
Walk the shoreline west past Blankenese until the houses stop and a small working leading light stands on the sand, with the shipping lane right in front of it. Reach it on foot — and photograph it.
Eat a burger in the city that named it
The patty travelled from here to America as the "Hamburg steak" and came back as the burger. Eat one in its home port — and photograph it.
Concert or plaza view at the Elbphilharmonie
Hear a concert under the wave-shaped glass roof, or ride the long curved escalator to the Plaza terrace and watch the harbour — and photograph it.
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