Potsdam audiotours

Frederick the Great named his summer palace Sanssouci, meaning without cares, and had it built on a terraced vineyard hill between 1745 and 1747 in a deliberately intimate Rococo style. He meant it as a place to escape court ceremony, and it worked: he spent more time there than anywhere else, retreating to philosophise with Voltaire and play the flute. The palace and its sprawling gardens, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, are what most visitors come to see. They are extraordinary, and they are only part of the story.

Potsdam has roughly twenty lakes within the city boundaries, and only a quarter of the city is built up.

The rest is forest, water and parkland in a landscape shaped by glacial moraines and the River Havel. The Dutch Quarter, commissioned by Frederick William I in the 1730s, is a pocket of 150 red-brick gabled houses transplanted from the Netherlands to house craftsmen the king wanted to attract. Studio Babelsberg, established in 1912 and the oldest large-scale film studio in the world, produced Metropolis and The Blue Angel and is still operating today.