Museum Island
A UNESCO World Heritage ensemble of five grand museums set on an island in the Spree, gathered around the green Lustgarten. Built over a century as Prussia's self-styled sanctuary for art and science, it holds treasures from the Pergamon Altar to the bust of Nefertiti.
About this place
Stretching across the northern tip of the Spree island, Museum Island is one of the world's most remarkable cultural landscapes, a cluster of five great temples to learning raised by the Prussian kings over more than a hundred years. It began in 1830 with Karl Friedrich Schinkel's serene neoclassical Altes Museum, the first public museum in Berlin, and in 1841 King Friedrich Wilhelm IV decreed that the whole quarter be turned into a sanctuary for art and science. There followed the Neues Museum, the columned Alte Nationalgalerie, the Bode-Museum on the island's prow, and finally Alfred Messel's monumental Pergamonmuseum, home to the colossal Pergamon Altar and the blue-tiled Ishtar Gate of Babylon. Hammered by Allied bombing in 1945 and left to crumble for decades in divided East Berlin, the museums were painstakingly restored, most famously the war-scarred Neues Museum, sensitively rebuilt by David Chipperfield. In 1999 UNESCO crowned the ensemble a World Heritage Site as a unique record of how the modern museum itself was born.
Key facts
- 5 museums — Five great houses make up the island: the Altes Museum, Neues Museum, Alte Nationalgalerie, Bode-Museum and Pergamonmuseum
- 1999 year — The whole ensemble was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site
- 100 years — It took roughly a century to build, from the Altes Museum in 1830 to the Pergamonmuseum in 1930
📍 Bodestraße, 10178, Berlin