Brandenburg Gate

Why go

visitBerlin, the city's official tourism website, says the Brandenburg Gate was built between 1788 and 1791 to designs by Carl Gotthard Langhans, was inspired by the gateway to the Acropolis in Athens, and is Berlin's only surviving historical city gate. It was crowned in 1793 by Johann Gottfried Schadow's Quadriga, which Napoleon had taken to Paris in 1806 and which was returned to Berlin in 1814. The same page says that after the Berlin Wall went up in 1961 the gate stood in an exclusion zone, inaccessible to locals and visitors, and that it was officially opened on 22 December 1989. visitBerlin also says a Berlin Tourist Info office is in the gate's south wing. This record is the gate itself, not Pariser Platz or the station named after it.