Hamburg tourist attractions include St. Michaelis Church, Hamburg City Hall, Landungsbrücken port, Hamburg canal cruise, and Tierpark Hagenbeck zoo.
St. Michaelis Church (www.st-michaelis.de), from 1786, is Hamburg’s most famous church and its facilities can accommodate up to around 2,500 people, which also makes it the city’s biggest church.
Highlights within the church include its 132 meter (433 ft) tall baroque tower, which is entirely coated with copper.
From the baroque tower, to which you can get to using either an elevator or the stairs, you’ll have spectacular views of the city of Hamburg.
Hamburg Rathaus (hamburgische-buergerschaft.de) is the famous City Hall, nowadays open for public to visit.
The square in front of City Hall, Rathausmarkt, is often said to be the most beautiful in Hamburg, maybe even in Germany, and in many ways, the square resembles the famous piazzas and campos in Venice.
On the other side of the Rathausmarkt canal bridges, there are a number the best shopping gallerias, as well as Mönckebergstaße, Hamburg’s main commercial shopping street.
The Renaissance style Rathaus has a total of 647 rooms, six more than the famous Buckingham Palace in England, and it is one of the best proofs of the historical wealth of Hamburg as a maritime power.
You can visit the building, for example, using guided tours, with each tour — available in three languages (French, German, and English) — taking around 40 minutes.
Landungsbrücken port area is part of Hamburg’s famous harbor, located within St. Paul district, between the lower harbor and Fischmarkt (Fish Market), on the banks of the Elbe River.
Today, Landungsbrücken is one of the main Hamburg tourist attractions, and it is also one of the most important travel centers in the city, thanks to its…
- yacht marina,
- S-Bahn station, and
- U-Bahn station.
On the western end of the port, you can find an entrance to the Old Elbe tunnel, while the eastern end features Pegelturm, a tower indicating the water level within the harbor.
A Hamburg canal / harbor cruise is easy to combine to a visit to the Landungsbrücken, as the port features:
- HADAG ferries,
- harbor tour cruise boats,
- passenger boats (for trips to the lower Elbe), and
- catamaran boats to Stade and Helgoland.
Hamburg is known as the “Venice of the North“, due to the fact that the city is full of canals, with over 2,300 bridges crossing them…which is more than in Amsterdam and Venice, combined.
Highlights of these canal cruises typically include Hamburg’s historic warehouse district, an area, where the city’s rich merchants used to store luxury products imported from all around the world.
Using a canal cruise, you can also travel between the city’s main museums.
Finally, Hamburg tourist attractions feature Tierpark Hagenbeck zoo (www.hagenbeck-tierpark.de), started from Carl Hagenbeck Sr.’s personal collection of animals in 1863, and today, the zoo has grown into a position of one of the most significant zoos in Germany.
The zoo was the first of its kind in the world, where the animal facilities are surrounded by moats instead of cages, so that the animals are in as natural environment as possible.
Another innovation at the zoo, from the 1890s, were the “panorama” shows, where animals on display seem to be within the same area from the viewer’s point of view…
…but are, in reality, separated by moats.