Berlin Highlights 3-Hour Guided Bike Tour

Alexanderplatz and the TV Tower, where the ride begins

The tour meets at the bike office at the base of the TV Tower on Alexanderplatz, the busiest square of the former East Berlin. The tower, finished in 1969 and 368 metres tall, is the highest structure in Germany and visible from almost every stop on the route, which makes it a useful landmark for finding your way back. Around the square stand the World Clock, the Neptune Fountain of 1891 and the Red City Hall, and the guide uses the first minutes here to explain how the square was rebuilt as a showcase of the socialist city.

You choose an electric bike that fits, adjust the saddle, take a helmet if you want one and get a short briefing on riding in Berlin's bike lanes. The group then rolls west along the wide avenues towards the Spree, and within five minutes the first stop, Museum Island, is in sight.

Museum Island and the Lustgarten

The first proper stop is Museum Island, the UNESCO World Heritage ensemble of five museums built between 1830 and 1930 on the northern half of the island in the Spree. You ride across the bridge to the Lustgarten, the lawn in front of the Old Museum with its row of eighteen Ionic columns, with Berlin Cathedral and its 98-metre dome on one side and the rebuilt baroque facade of the Humboldt Forum on the other. The guide explains the Pergamon Museum, the New Museum with the bust of Nefertiti and the Old National Gallery, and how the island became the cultural heart of the Prussian capital.

This stop is about 20 minutes of standing, talking and photographing, long enough to decide which museum you want to come back to. A Museum Island bike tour is also the best way to reach the quieter northern tip by the Bode Museum, which most walkers never see.

Bebelplatz, the centre of Prussian Berlin

A short ride along Unter den Linden brings the group to Bebelplatz, the square laid out in the 1740s as the Forum Fridericianum, the showpiece of Prussian Berlin. On one side stands the State Opera, the first building completed here in 1742, on another the domed St Hedwig's Cathedral, modelled on the Pantheon in Rome, and the curved Old Royal Library that Berliners call the chest of drawers. Across the avenue is Humboldt University, where the guide points out the statues and the boulevard of lime trees that gives Unter den Linden its name.

In the middle of the square, under a glass plate set into the paving, is the memorial to the book burning of May 1933: an empty white library with shelves for twenty thousand books. The guide tells the story here, and it sets up the Reichstag stop that follows. Expect about 15 minutes on foot before riding on.

The Brandenburg Gate and Pariser Platz

The Brandenburg Gate is the stop everyone has been waiting for. Completed in 1791 as the city gate on the road to Brandenburg, it is 26 metres high, built of sandstone in the Doric style and crowned by the Quadriga, the four-horse chariot of the goddess of victory. For 28 years it stood in the no-man's land of the Berlin Wall, visible from both sides but reachable from neither, and since 1989 it has been the symbol of German unity. The group gathers on Pariser Platz, the square on its eastern side framed by embassies and the Academy of Arts.

The guide explains the gate's history, from the Napoleonic theft of the Quadriga to the celebrations of 1989, and gives you time for the classic photograph through the central passage. Bikes are parked for about 15 minutes; the Reichstag is only two minutes further on.

The Reichstag and the Government Quarter

Just north of the gate stands the Reichstag, the parliament building completed in 1894, burned in 1933, stormed in 1945 and restored in 1999 with the glass dome that visitors can climb for views over the city. On the lawn in front, the guide tells the story of the rise of the Nazi regime, the Reichstag fire and how the building became the seat of the Bundestag again after reunification. Beyond it you see the modern parliament office buildings on both banks of the Spree, linked by a footbridge that marks the exact line of the former Wall.

This is the most important history stop of the tour and takes around 20 minutes. Afterwards the group rides along the edge of the Tiergarten park and past Potsdamer Platz, once the busiest square in Europe and then a wasteland between the two Walls, now a quarter of glass towers, on the way south to Checkpoint Charlie.

Checkpoint Charlie and the Berlin Wall

Checkpoint Charlie was the best-known crossing point between East and West Berlin, the place where American and Soviet tanks faced each other in October 1961 and where diplomats and foreigners passed through the Wall. Today a replica guardhouse and the famous sign warning that you are leaving the American sector stand in the middle of Friedrichstraße, and the guide explains how the crossing worked and the escape attempts made here. A few minutes away on Niederkirchnerstraße stands one of the longest surviving stretches of the original Berlin Wall, its concrete scarred and crumbling, beside the Topography of Terror exhibition.

Standing in front of the real Wall after the stories at the Reichstag ties the whole morning together, and it is the last stop before the group rides back through Mitte to Alexanderplatz, returning the bikes about 3 hours after you set off.