Berlin in a day on foot: from the Reichstag dome to the Nikolaiviertel

Berlin does not have one old town to tick off. Its sights are strung along a line that runs from the parliament quarter in the west, down the boulevard of the Prussian kings, past the island where the city began, and on to the small quarter that East Berlin rebuilt around its oldest church. This guide follows that line in one day, on foot, from west to east.

The day has three parts. The morning is about the state: the Reichstag, the Brandenburg Gate and the monuments of Unter den Linden. Midday belongs to the Spree island and its one long indoor visit. The afternoon is for lunch in the Nikolaiviertel and a slow walk back through what you have seen.

The stops are uneven on purpose. Two of them, the Reichstag dome and the Humboldt Forum, take real time. Most of the others are outdoors, free to look at and quick, so the day leaves room to sit down.

1. Reichstag dome. Start as early as your booking allows; our data gives the dome's hours as 08:00 to 21:45. The glass dome was designed by Norman Foster for the rebuilt parliament building and is the best first look at the city you can get: a full circle of skyline, reached by two spiral ramps that wind around each other. In the middle hangs a mirrored cone that sends daylight down into the debating chamber, which you can see directly beneath your feet. Use the view to pick out where the day is going: everything on this route lies to the east.

2. Memorial to the Murdered Members of the Reichstag. Before you leave the square in front of the building, find the row of upright cast-iron plates near its south-west corner. There are 96 of them, one for each member of parliament murdered under the Nazi regime, and each carries a name, dates and a place of death along its broken upper edge. It was put up in 1992 and designed so that further names can be added. It is easy to walk past and worth two minutes: the dome shows the parliament Germany has now, and this shows what happened to the previous one.

3. Brandenburg Gate. Cross the open ground south of the Reichstag and the gate appears at the end of Pariser Platz. It was built between 1788 and 1791 as a city gate, and for decades of the Cold War it stood just inside the Wall, out of reach. Look up at the chariot on top, the Quadriga. Napoleon's troops carried it off to Paris in 1806, and it was brought back in 1814. Walk through the middle of the gate instead of around it, and notice how quickly the noise of the square drops once you are on the boulevard side.

4. Frederick II of Prussia. From the gate, walk east along Unter den Linden, the old royal boulevard. Near its far end, in the middle of the road, Frederick the Great rides above the traffic. Christian Daniel Rauch's bronze was unveiled in 1851. Look at the pedestal rather than the king: its middle band is crowded with 74 men of his age, generals for the most part, with the corners given to the four cardinal virtues. The statue has its own Cold War story. East Berlin removed it in 1950, it stood for years in a park in Potsdam, and it came back to the boulevard only in 1980.

5. Memorial for the Nazi book burnings. A few steps from the statue, Bebelplatz opens to the south, framed by the State Opera, the old royal library and St Hedwig's Cathedral. On the evening of 10 May 1933, students burned about 20,000 books here, among them works by Heinrich Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Karl Marx and Albert Einstein, while Joseph Goebbels spoke. The memorial by Micha Ullman, The Empty Library, is a pane of glass set into the cobbles. Below it is a white room lined with empty shelves, with space for the 20,000 volumes that were lost. A plaque nearby quotes a line Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821: where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.

6. The Zeughaus. Cross back to the boulevard side of Bebelplatz and the long Baroque building on the next block is the Zeughaus. Building began in 1695 and it served as the Prussian arsenal, the place where the army's weapons were kept. Since 1990 it has housed the German Historical Museum. Treat this as an outside stop: stand across the street to take in the whole facade and the weapons and trophies carved along the roofline. If you want to go in, check on the museum's own site before you come, because its programme and parts of the building change.

7. Humboldt Forum. Cross the Spree onto the island, and the largest building on it is the Berlin Palace, rebuilt to a design by Franco Stella and opened to the public as the Humboldt Forum in 2021. It is named after the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and houses the Berlin State Museums' collections from outside Europe, the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, together with an exhibition on Berlin itself. This is the day's main indoor visit, and it is a big one, so choose one part instead of trying to see it all. The collections are also the subject of a long public argument about objects acquired in the colonial period, the Benin Bronzes among them, which the museum addresses in its displays. Our data gives the hours as 10:30 to 18:30, closed on Tuesdays. The roof terrace looks back along the route you walked this morning.

8. Zum Nußbaum. Lunch is a short walk east across the river, in the Nikolaiviertel, the small quarter around the Nikolaikirche. Know what you are looking at: this is not a surviving medieval district but one rebuilt by East Berlin between 1985 and 1987 for the city's 750th anniversary. Zum Nußbaum is part of that story. The original inn, dated 1571, stood on the other side of the island and counted the artist Heinrich Zille among its regulars; it was destroyed by bombing in 1943, and this copy was built here, with a new walnut tree planted in front. Our data lists it as a German restaurant open from 12:00, which suits the timing of the day.

Walked in this order, the stops tell Berlin's story roughly as it happened. Unter den Linden and the Zeughaus are the Prussian capital; the plates at the Reichstag and the empty shelves under Bebelplatz mark what the Nazi years destroyed; the gate that stood just inside the Wall shows what division did to the centre. The rebuilt palace and the copied inn show the other constant: this is a city that keeps deciding what to put back.

If the day runs short, drop the inside of the Humboldt Forum, not the walk east.