Tiergarten: the great park and the golden column
Brandenburg Gate to the zoo through the wood, with 285 steps up the Siegessäule in the middle. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Brandenburger Tor
Start with your back to the crowds and walk west into the trees. Everyone else photographs the gate; you're using it as a doorway into the *Tiergarten* and barely looking back.

2. Sowjetisches Ehrenmal (Soviet War Memorial)
A curved colonnade with two tanks and a bronze soldier, raised in 1945 within months of the city's fall. Quieter than its history; stand a moment, then carry on west.

3. Rousseauinsel
A tiny island on a pond named for the philosopher, with an urn for a monument. You can't reach it and you don't need to — the point is the still water and the herons. Walk the bank slowly.

4. Siegessäule
Climb it. The 285 steps spiral up inside to the base of the gold figure Berliners call the *Goldelse*, and the platform gives you the whole axis east to the gate and west to the zoo. Closed Mondays.

5. Schloss Bellevue
The president's house — a white neoclassical *Schloss* (palace) you see from the gate but can't enter. The flag flying means he's in. Worth the short detour north for the lawn and the river behind it.

6. Café am Neuen See
A beer garden on a lake near the western edge, with rowing boats in season and chestnut trees overhead. The natural place to stop before the park spits you out at the traffic. A drink earned by four kilometres of wood.

7. Zoologischer Garten
The walk ends where the park does, at the old West Berlin terminus. U-Bahn, S-Bahn and the regional trains all meet here; the zoo entrance with the elephant gate is a minute south if you want it.

Tiergarten: the great park and the golden column