Museumsinsel (Museum Island)

Home to the Pergamon Museum, Neues Museum, Altes Museum, Alte Nationalgalerie, and Bode Museum, Museum Island concentrates over a century of German museum-building into one riverine complex, covering everything from ancient Near Eastern architecture to 19th-century European painting.

Planning your visit

Museum Island is five museums on one sandbank in the Spree, built between 1830 and 1930 as a deliberate statement of Prussian cultural ambition, and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Pergamon holds monumental reconstructed architecture — the Ishtar Gate of Babylon in its glazed blue brick, the Market Gate of Miletus — though the building is undergoing a long phased renovation and major sections are closed, which is the single most important thing to check before planning. The Neues holds Nefertiti. The Altes covers classical antiquity, the Alte Nationalgalerie nineteenth-century painting, and the Bode sculpture and Byzantine art.

Doing more than two properly in a day is unrealistic. The buildings are large, the collections dense, and museum fatigue is real.

A combined ticket covers all five and is the sensible purchase for anyone planning more than one, along with the James Simon Gallery entrance building that now serves the complex.

Bookable options include multiple-museum entry tickets and guided walking tours of the island covering the architecture and the history of how the collections were assembled. Current availability is listed below.