The Tiergarten is a hunting forest the Prussian kings turned into a park, and it is the green lung Berlin breathes through. Four kilometres from the Brandenburg Gate to the zoo, straight through the wood, with the city's tallest gilded angel at the halfway mark.
Start at Brandenburger Tor and walk west, away from the cameras. Within a hundred metres the trees close over and the noise drops. The Sowjetisches Ehrenmal comes first — a 1945 memorial with two tanks, sober and strange among the planes. Then the paths loosen into proper woodland; follow the water to the Rousseauinsel, a pond island that asks nothing of you but a slow lap of the bank.
The Siegessäule is the middle and the climb. Take the 285 steps to the Goldelse and read the park from above — the dead-straight axis, the river bending past Schloss Bellevue, the spire of the Gedächtniskirche to the west. Closed Mondays, so plan around it.
Come down and bear south to the Café am Neuen See, a lakeside beer garden under chestnuts. End at Zoologischer Garten, where the wood gives way to the city again.
