What's the must-see thing in Berlin?

Book the Reichstag dome before you book your flight. Registration fills up weeks in advance, despite costing nothing. You enter through airport-grade security on the west side, take a lift to the roof terrace, then walk twin spiral ramps while the Bundestag chamber sits below through a glass floor. The wind at the top carries diesel fumes and linden blossom from Tiergarten, 200 metres west. On a grey afternoon, and Berlin gets plenty of those, the dome's 360 cone-shaped mirrors still catch enough light to warm the concrete underfoot. A GPS-triggered audio guide points out Cyrillic graffiti that Soviet soldiers scratched into these walls in May 1945. Those inscriptions survived Foster's renovation on purpose, alongside scorch marks from the February 1933 fire that gave Hitler his emergency-powers pretext. The whole circuit takes about 30 minutes.

The Brandenburg Gate at Pariser Platz is the photograph everyone takes, and it earns it. The 26-metre sandstone arch, completed in 1791, faces east toward what was the Soviet sector. Stand on the west side at sunset and the stone turns copper against a darkening sky. The gate itself takes 5 minutes. What takes longer, and should, is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, a 7-minute walk south on Ebertstraße. Peter Eisenman's 2,711 concrete stelae cover 19,000 square metres. They start knee-high at the edges, then drop to over 4 metres deep at the centre, where Tiergarten traffic fades to nothing and the air between the columns feels noticeably cooler. The underground information centre closes at 19:00, no ticket needed. Visit the memorial before your Reichstag slot if you've booked an afternoon time.

Museum Island is a spit of land in the Spree, a 15-minute walk east of the Reichstag along Unter den Linden. Five museums in a UNESCO-listed cluster, all within 200 metres of each other. The Pergamon Museum, Berlin's most visited, has been partly closed for renovation since October 2023, with the Ishtar Gate and Processional Way behind scaffolding until at least 2027. Go to the Neues Museum instead. The 3,300-year-old limestone bust of Nefertiti sits in a dim octagonal room on the upper floor, lit from one side, and the silence around it is the only genuine hush you'll find on Museum Island. A combination ticket for three museums costs €22. Budget 3-4 hours if you add the Alte Nationalgalerie's Caspar David Friedrich paintings one floor above the French Impressionists. Mornings before 11:00 are manageable. After that, school groups fill the staircases.

If you have one full day, do all three on foot. Start at Brandenburger Tor station on the S1, S2, or S25, walk the memorial, then continue north to the Reichstag for your timed slot. From the dome, follow the Spree east past the glass federal buildings where the river smells faintly of algae in summer and you'll reach Museum Island in 20 minutes. A Berlin WelcomeCard for AB zones runs about €23 for 48 hours, covers all buses and trains, and gives 25% off museum entry. The city is flat, and the total distance between these three stops comes to about 3 km. Berlin's postwar gaps, rebuilt embassies, and Cold War traces are visible on nearly every block between Pariser Platz and the Spree.