Hamburg, Tyskland

Hamburg is Germany's second-largest city after Berlin, the country's media capital, the seat of one of Europe's three largest container ports (the third after Rotterdam and Antwerp), and a Free and Hanseatic City — one of three remaining German Stadtstaaten alongside Berlin and Bremen. The city sits 100 kilometres up the Elbe from the North Sea, where the river widens through a lattice of shipping channels, harbour basins, and tidal canals; Hamburg has more bridges (around 2,500) than Venice and Amsterdam combined and the highest concentration of consulates after New York. The defining geographies are three: the Hanseatic merchant city of the Innenstadt and the twin Alster lakes (Binnenalster and Außenalster, the latter a 164-hectare urban lake at the city's heart, dammed from a tributary of the Elbe in the 13th century); the redbrick Speicherstadt and HafenCity below, where the world's largest contiguous warehouse complex (1883-1927, UNESCO World Heritage since 2015) frames Europe's most ambitious urban regeneration project (157 hectares of former dock land transformed since 2003, with the Elbphilharmonie at its tip); and the western harbour edge of St. Pauli and Reeperbahn, the historic sailors' quarter that became the city's entertainment district, where the Beatles played 281 nights at the Indra, the Top Ten Club, the Star-Club and the Kaiserkeller between August 1960 and December 1962. The Elbphilharmonie (Herzog & de Meuron, opened 2017 after sixteen years of construction and a fivefold budget overrun) is the city's modern landmark — a sail-shaped glass concert hall set on top of a converted 1960s cocoa warehouse, with its public Plaza viewing deck at 37 metres free to all. The Speicherstadt itself, with its Wilhelmine brick gables and arched canal portals, holds the Miniatur Wunderland (the world's largest model railway, 1,490 m² across fifteen themed regions) and the International Maritime Museum. The Innenstadt around the Rathaus (1897, neo-Renaissance, with its famous Diele entrance hall and 112-metre tower) holds the Jungfernstieg promenade along the Binnenalster, the Mönckebergstraße shopping spine, and St. Petri, St. Jacobi, and St. Michaelis — the latter, 'der Michel', the 132-metre baroque tower (1762) that is Hamburg's universal symbol and a panoramic viewing platform. Reeperbahn and the surrounding St. Pauli neighbourhood — the Beatles' Große Freiheit, the Davidwache police station, the Sunday-morning Fischmarkt at Altona since 1703, the FC St. Pauli football club's distinctive left-wing fan culture — give the western waterfront its irreverent counterweight to Hanseatic propriety. Hamburg Airport (HAM, IATA) at Fuhlsbüttel, eight kilometres north of the centre, is Germany's fifth-busiest by passenger numbers, with the S1 S-Bahn line connecting it to Hauptbahnhof in 25 minutes. The city's transport runs on the Hamburger Verkehrsverbund (HVV) — Germany's first integrated transport association (1965) — covering U-Bahn, S-Bahn, buses, harbour ferries (the HADAG line is part of the regular fare), and the regional buses out into Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony. Hauptbahnhof, eight tracks for ICE long-distance services and ten more for regional and S-Bahn, is the central interchange — ICE services every hour to Berlin (1h 45min), Frankfurt (3h 50min), Munich (5h 40min), and the new Fehmarnbelt rail tunnel (opening 2029) will reduce Hamburg-Copenhagen to 2h 30min.