40 min
50 min
U2 · U9 · S3 · S5 · S7 · S9
4.3 / km²
23
3
141
+12% vs city
Counted from OpenStreetMap and Inside Airbnb (CC BY 4.0)
Staying in Tiergarten
Tiergarten is the Ortsteil west of Mitte, and it is mostly the park it is named after: 200 hectares of woodland between the Brandenburg Gate and the Zoo, with the Siegessäule in the middle. Around it sit the Kulturforum with the Philharmonie and the Gemäldegalerie, the embassy quarter along Tiergartenstraße, the Hansaviertel, and the western half of Potsdamer Platz.
As a base it is quietly excellent for a certain trip. You are 30 minutes on foot from Museum Island through the park, five minutes from the Philharmonie, and the hotels here are the large international ones with the space and the service that implies. Nothing in Berlin is prettier to walk home through in June.
The catch is that there is barely a street to live on. Outside Potsdamer Platz and the little Hansaviertel there are no corner shops, no bakeries and no bars - the district is park, embassies and cultural institutions, all of which close. Eating means Potsdamer Platz's mall or a taxi, and rates track the conference calendar rather than the season. Book it for the Philharmonie and the park; book Mitte or Kreuzberg for Berlin.
What works
- The park itself: 200 hectares, open at all hours, free and unfenced
- Philharmonie, Gemäldegalerie and the Kulturforum are inside the district
- About 30 minutes on foot to Museum Island, all of it through trees
- S-Bahn at Tiergarten and Bellevue plus U2 at Potsdamer Platz
What does not
- Almost no ordinary streets - no bakery, no corner shop, no local bar
- Eating out means the Potsdamer Platz mall or leaving the district
- Big international hotels priced off the conference calendar
- The park is unlit at night and not a pleasant crossing after dark
Tiergarten is the borough extending northwest from the Zoologischer Garten train station, taking its name from the large park that covers most of its area, which in turn takes its name from the world's oldest zoo in its southern end, close to the train station.The border between the Ortsteile Mitte and Tiergarten runs right across the Potsdamer Platz, and most of the buildings and institutions described here are actually in Tiergarten, but for the sake of making this guide more useful are described along with the others which fall in Mitte proper.