Berlin · Mitte
Museumsinsel
Five museums on one sandbank in the Spree, built to hold an empire's idea of itself
The Ishtar Gate of Babylon, rebuilt full size in a room that barely contains it
Prussia decided in 1830 that a nation needed a public collection and then spent a century filling an island in the middle of the river with it. The result is five separate museums on one sandbank: antiquity in the Altes and Neues, the nineteenth century in the Alte Nationalgalerie, Byzantine and Islamic art in the Bode, and the architecture halls of the Pergamon, which hold reconstructed monuments at their original scale.
The Pergamon is partly closed for a renovation that has already outlasted several directors, and parts of the site reopen in stages. What remains open is still the most concentrated archaeological display in Europe, and the Neues Museum next door holds the Nefertiti bust in a room built specifically to make you walk towards her.
The detail
Good to know
- Founded
- 1830, expanded until 1930
- UNESCO
- World Heritage Site since 1999
- Houses
- Five, one ticket
- Do not miss
- Nefertiti, Neues Museum, first floor
More in Berlin
Three more rooms in Berlin
Opera houseStanding roomBerlin · Mitte
Staatsoper Unter den Linden
Frederick the Great's opera house, rebuilt three times and still the best acoustics in the city
Concert hallIconBerlin · Tiergarten
Berliner Philharmonie
The hall that invented vineyard seating and changed concert architecture worldwide
Live roomLateBerlin · Friedrichshain
Berghain
A power station turned into the most serious dance floor in the world, and the hardest door
Museums
Elsewhere: museums
MuseumBerlin · Moabit
Hamburger Bahnhof
A nineteenth-century railway terminus holding the contemporary collection of the nation
MuseumFreeLondon · Bloomsbury
The British Museum
Eight million objects, two and a half centuries of argument and no admission charge
MuseumFreeLondon · Bankside
Tate Modern
A power station on the Thames holding the national collection of modern art, free to enter