Berlin’s hidden gems: look beyond the Brandenburg Gate

4. Interactive illusions and tricks

Just off busy Alexanderplatz behind an inconspicuous façade you can enter a world of illusions and tricks of the mind at Illuseum Berlin. Here you can challenge your senses with a variety of optical illusions. You can walk on the ceiling, shrink and grow, and step inside a kaleidoscope, and all while taking great photos and videos.

But Illuseum Berlin is also a great place to learn about how our brains perceive the world around us. The illusions on display demonstrate how easily our senses can be fooled, and they can help you to better understand how our brains work. At Illuseum Berlin you can learn while playing.

5. A journey through the world of digital art

The most visited sight in Friedrichshain is the East Side Gallery but a twenty minute walk from the world’s longest open-air gallery will bring you to one of Berlin’s hidden gems: the Lighthouse of Digital Art. Inside a former industrial hangar, you’ll find a venue buzzing with creativity and innovation, that offers a unique blend of art, technology and entertainment.

The space is filled with vibrant colours, pulsating rhythms, and mesmerizing projections. A visit to this Berlin Museum is not a passive activity, you will be encouraged to interact and engage, as you can manipulate the projections through gestures and movement. The centrepiece of the exhibition is a 30-meter-long hall filled with mirrors and LED lights that create an ever-changing kaleidoscope of reflections and patterns.

6. The cinematic bridge connecting Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain

Berlin is home to many bridges, more than Venice even, but one of the most beautiful sits outside the city centre and connects the neighbourhoods of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain: the Oberbaum Bridge. Because of its location, the Oberbaum Bridge is less busy than other places in the city. The busiest time is around sun set, as the bridge provides a beautiful view.

The bridge has two decks, both road traffic and two Berlin U-Bahn lines run over the bridge, while pedestrians walk on the lower level. Decorated with red bricks, the bridge looks like a castle from the Margraviate Brandenburg region of Germany. The bridge has featured in several films and TV series, such as The Bourne Supremacy (2004), Run Lola Run (1998), Unknown (2011) and Berlin Station (2016).

7. A historic market hall from the 19th-century

A fifteen minute walk from the bridge into Kreuzberg will bring you to Markthalle Neun. It is one of the few remaining historic market halls in Berlin. The old railway market hall was fully renovated in 2011, 120 years after its original opening.

This indoor market is open six days a week, with a special Street Food market on Thursdays and an extra big market on Friday and Saturday. There is a selection of rotating food stalls, offering everything from traditional German sausages to Asian fusion dishes. You will also find plenty of fresh produce, delicacies and reginal specialities.

8. The spy capital of the world

During the Cold War Berlin was filled with spies from both East and West, as both the Soviet and NATO powers tried to get the upper hand on each other. The German Spy Museum is the perfect place to explore this history of the city and learn more about the history of spy craft. The museum’s collection includes items such as an Enigma code machine, a lipstick camera and the cryptophone used by German chancellor Gerhard Schröder.

Along with historic items, the museum also features interactive exhibits. You can try to make your way through a laser maze, decode messages, find microdots and bugs. The German Spy Museum sits just off Potsdamer Platz on Leipziger Platz.

9. An old listening station with a beautiful view

This hidden gem in Berlin takes you to the edges of the city, where a man-made hill created from debris and rubble once held a U.S. listening station. Teufelsberg, or Devil Mountain, sits on top of an unfinished Nazi military-technical college, as blowing it up proofed more difficult than covering it in rubble.

In 1963, the NSA built one of its largest listening stations on the hill, which remained in service until the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today, climbing the 120 metre high hill will give you a beautiful view over Berlin. Much of the building has been covered by street art, making the both the view up close and at a distance worth the visit to the outskirts of Berlin.