An icon as much as a district, Kreuzberg 36 is the wayward child of Berlin’s neighborhoods: located at the intersection of East and West, perched for a large part on the riverbank and lined with canals, it has always been home to the oddballs of the West, be they punks, revolutionaries, artists, Turkish guest workers, hopeless junkies or rockstars.

Now it is home to numerous startups and trendy restaurants while remaining a beloved hang-out for Erasmus students and international tourists. However, old Kreuzberg hasn’t completely sold out to the wave of gentrification that is slowly sweeping its unkempt corners. In fact it still features a high immigrant population, graffiti covered walls and various experiments in alternative housing.

Our tour will walk you through the locations that make this place unique: we will show you the repurposed industrial venues around Schlesisches Tor, the yummiest of Berlin’s covered markets, and the Tree House that a Turkish immigrant built in the 1983 on a tiny strip of no-man’s land left unclaimed under the Berlin Wall.

We will pace down the corridors of an ancient hospital whose chemist was one of Germany’s most famous poets to find, where the patients used to be, art galleries, a music school and lovely restaurants. You will marvel at the street art and ebullient life in Oranienstrasse and see Berlin’s newest and biggest mosque defy the elevated metro station at Görlitzerpark. And if all this walking makes you hungry no worries: this area has no rivals in the density and variety of its streetfood joints!

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