Various shops near Brandenburg Gate
About 40 kilometers southwest of Berlin, it is a tourist hot spot with its one dozen or so classical palaces turned into museums and galleries and its small town charm. Accessible by S-Bahn or Regio trains it’s only a short 30 minute ride away by transit. My tip? Bring a bike, there’s so much to see!
Potsdam is the mother of all towns in Berlin transport’s fare zone C. Being its own actual city with its own zones A,B, and C, there is definitely a lot worth exploring there. Potsdam used to be the royal seat of Prussia and later Germany with several large palaces – but that’s another side of town, check out Park Sansoucci for that. There are lots and lots of palaces in the area connected with huge parks which used to be the Kaiser’s personal playground. Nearly all of them are open to be entered and you can purchase a day ticket to visit all of them in one day. It’s a lot to take in but doable in a day. Bring a camera, it’s really very pretty.
Dutch quarter
You can probably tell from the name that the Germans were quite behind in the European superiority complex for palaces and even went as far as to imitate their designs and adopted a French name for the place. If you’ve been to the museum in Schloss Köpenick, you would know all about the German imitation game in the nation’s early days in an attempt to form national identity. I know that at least one of the palaces has been converted into a university building. Then there’s the new palace, the old palace, the Sansoucci palace, the orangery…
So now we set the scene, with such a large town just for the king, there must definitely be people serving him right? Right. Visit the Dutch Quarter, four whole blocks of red brick Dutch houses built by the king to house the Dutch craftsmen who made the palaces as beautiful as they are. There’s also a mini Brandenburg gate because the road between Berlin and Brandenburg passes through Potsdam, there you will find a very long stretch of pedestrian only street with lots of shops to spend your time in. Of course there’s also the Russian Village where a whole bunch of Russian settlers once lived and built a community of entirely wooden log houses.
Alexandrowsky Russian village
The further north you go, the weirder it gets. Due to the fact that the northern areas are new developments, it’s pretty quiet up there with just construction sites and huge unused park – Volkspark Potsdam. As you leave, pass by the film museum and the Alter Markt where you will find a lot of palace-like buildings. One of them even have ‘I’m not a palace’ written on the side in French.
This post is part of my Berlin Zone C series from 2016-17. At the time, I lived in Berlin and had a Google Sites set up to blog about locations around Berlin’s periphery. I saved all my assets before Google decommissioned Classic Sites in 2021 and re-uploaded them to this site over time. Photographs were taken with an iPhone 5s.
