Explore Berlin's Museum Island from Home

Welcome to Berlin's Museumsinsel, or Museum Island. Since 1830, this island in the middle of the River Spree has been home to some of the most important museums and galleries in Germany, covering almost every era of history. There's lots to see here, so let's start the tour.

The Neues Museum (New Museum) was built shortly after the Altes Museum (Old Museum), to house the increasingly large collection, as well as the new Egyptian artefacts and ethnographic collection. Upstairs were the Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance rooms.

During the Second World War, the museum was almost totally destroyed, and it lay in ruin for decades afterwards. It reopened in 2009, and today you can see objects dating from the stone age and Ancient Egyptian, like the bust of Nefertiti.

One of the marvels of Museum Island, The Pergamon Museum exists essentially to house this enormous ancient monument, the ancient Greek Pergamon Altar from the city of Pergamon, in modern-day Turkey. A masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture.

Besides the altar, the museum holds the Market Gate of Miletus. Built in the 2nd Century CE and destroyed in an earthquake in the 10th or 11th Century. It was then brought in pieces to Berlin, where it was painstakingly reassembled.

Technically the Deutsches Historisches Museum isn't on the island, but it is on the western bank of the Spree, and as Germany's national historical museum, and as a piece of outstanding Baroque architecture, we simply couldn't miss it.

Through 7000 objects, the permanent exhibition of the museum traces the history of Germany from the medieval era to the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification in 1990.