Charlottenburg Palace

Charlottenburg Palace stands on Spandauer Damm in the Charlottenburg district and is Berlin's largest surviving royal residence, begun in 1699 as a summer home for Sophie Charlotte, the first Queen in Prussia, and expanded over the following century into a sprawling baroque complex. Visitors touring the Old Palace (Altes Schloss) pass through the ornate Porcelain Cabinet, a room walled floor to ceiling in Chinese and Japanese porcelain, and the royal apartments furnished with 18th-century tapestries and portraiture, while the New Wing added by Frederick the Great houses additional state rooms and a collection of Watteau paintings. Badly damaged by Allied bombing in 1943, the palace was rebuilt over decades following the war using surviving photographs and fragments, a restoration still visible in the contrast between original stonework and reconstructed sections. A tour of the Old Palace interior takes 1.5 to 2 hours; visitors focused only on the free formal gardens and English landscape park behind the palace can spend 1 hour or more walking past the tulip beds, the Belvedere teahouse, and the mausoleum where several Prussian monarchs are buried. Spring, when the formal garden's tulip displays are in full bloom, is the most photogenic season, and weekday mornings offer the calmest interior tours before tour buses arrive around midday. The palace's symmetrical baroque facade is best photographed from across the garden's central lawn looking back toward the building.