Museumsinsel

Museumsinsel is a museum ensemble of five historic buildings in Berlin, on the island of Spreeinsel, listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999. Despite the fact that the buildings of the institutions do not occupy the entire area of the island, but only its northern tip, the exploration of the museum areas, as well as the antiquities exhibited in them, cannot be fit into the timeframe of a standard tour. Accordingly, if you can’t wait to get to know the unique artifacts of the Spreeinsel in detail, you’ll have to stay in Berlin for a couple or three days.

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General information

Museum Island could be called a hymn to the German passion for orderliness. And that’s not sarcasm. Only the descendants of Goethe and Schiller could have come up with the idea of turning a marshy area in the middle of the Spree into the most “fishy” place in terms of attendance by placing five of the best museums on it. However, the choice of location for the museum expositions was not entirely accidental: it was with the Spreeinsel, or rather, with the fishing village of Cologne (not to be confused with the city of the same name) that the history of Berlin began.

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During its existence, Museum Island has experienced both periods of growth and decline. For example, during World War II, many of the collections of Berlin’s museums were either stolen or irretrievably lost to destruction. As for the current look of one of Germany’s most “profitable” attractions, it is still in the process of changing. Since the early 2000s, the territory and buildings of Museum Island have fallen under the reconstruction program, as a result of which several new buildings have sprung up on the northern side of the Spreeinsel, while the former ones have been expanded and restored. The most notable structure of recent years is the James Simon Gallery. This white-washed structure with its elegant colonnade is not yet operational, but in the near future it will become the main entrance to the island, housing an infocenter and an underground boulevard that will take you to any of the five museums.

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