East Side Gallery

The East Side Gallery is the longest surviving piece of the Berlin Wall, about 0.8 miles (1.3 km) of it, still standing along the Spree river in Friedrichshain. This is not a reconstruction or a memorial fence: it is the actual inner wall that ran along the eastern bank of the river. In 1990, months after the border opened, artists from more than 20 countries painted 105 murals on the eastern face, the side ordinary East Germans had never been allowed to approach.

The best-known images are all here, including Dmitri Vrubel's painting of the East German and Soviet leaders kissing and Birgit Kinder's Trabant car bursting through the concrete. Several murals have been repainted by their original artists after decades of weather, graffiti and souvenir chipping.

Walk it in one direction instead of doubling back. The stretch runs between the Oberbaumbrücke, the double-decker brick bridge that was itself a border crossing, and Ostbahnhof station. Mornings are the calmest; by afternoon the sidewalk fills up and it becomes hard to see the panels without other people in front of them.

The gallery sits next to the Mercedes-Benz Arena and a short walk from Warschauer Straße and Ostbahnhof, both on the S-Bahn. The neighborhood around it, especially the former RAW railway yards, is the center of Berlin's club scene, so the area stays busy long after dark and the hotels here skew young and design-led.