Sightseeing in Hamburg

Sightseeing in Hamburg is a merchants' story told in brick and copper. The Rathaus, finished in 1897 in neo-Renaissance style, carries a 112-metre tower for a free Hanseatic city, and its facade is lined with Holy Roman emperors. The Michel, St. Michael's Church, has a 132-metre copper spire that long guided ships on the Elbe; it reopened in 1912 after a fire in 1906. St. Nikolai's 147-metre spire made it the tallest building in the world from 1874 to 1876, and since the bombing of 28 July 1943 its tower and a few walls stand as a memorial against war. The Kunsthalle holds seven centuries of European art, including Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and the Thalia Theater dates from 1843.

Hamburg sightseeing tours are mostly private and mostly on foot. A licensed guide leads a walk of nearly three hours from Mönckebergstraße, the main shopping street, to St. Petri and the Rathausmarkt, and a shorter cultural walk links the Kunsthalle, the Thalia Theater and the Laeiszhalle concert hall, named for a shipping family. The rest is play: a pirate-cook quest on the Landungsbrücken piers, an outdoor spy mission that starts at the State Opera, whose lineage runs back to Germany's first public opera house of 1678, and phone-led scavenger hunts that need no guide. One-way private transfers to Bremen, Hannover, Wolfsburg, Berlin and Copenhagen add a two-hour stop on the way.

Practical. Hamburg is mild and wet, about 770 mm of rain a year, with July the wettest month at 82 mm. Average highs are 14C in April, 18C in May, 23C in July and August, 19C in September and 14C in October, falling to 4C in January, so a waterproof and layers beat sunscreen. Both church towers have viewing platforms high above the old town, and the one at St. Nikolai, reached by a glass lift, stands 75 metres up. The Kunsthalle stands between the main station and the Alster lakes, which makes it a natural first or last stop for anyone arriving by train.