Hamburg Audio Tours

Hamburg is Germany's second-largest city and its largest port -- one of the busiest in Europe -- and the relationship between commerce and culture here is not a tension but a long-established arrangement. The Speicherstadt, a district of red-brick neo-Gothic warehouses built on oak piles in the Elbe in the 1880s to store the goods of the world (coffee, cocoa, spices, tea), was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015. It now holds museums, design agencies and the Miniatur Wunderland, the world's largest model railway with 16 kilometres of track and 1,040 trains. Next to it, the HafenCity district is the largest inner-city development project in Europe: a former dockland being converted into a new neighbourhood, complete with the Elbphilharmonie concert hall, whose distinctive glass wave of a roof rises from the top of a 1960s warehouse and contains some of the finest concert acoustics in the world.

The Reeperbahn in the St.

Pauli district has been Hamburg's red-light and entertainment district since the 19th century, and its reputation as the place the Beatles paid their early dues (at the Kaiserkeller and Star-Club in 1960-62, playing eight-hour sets for food money) has given it a particular kind of musical gravity. There is a Beatles-Platz at the top of Grosse Freiheit, where four steel silhouettes mark the spot. Hamburg's lake, the Alster -- actually a dammed river, divided into the Binnenalster and the Aussenalster in the middle of the city -- is where residents sail, swim and walk in good weather, and the cafes along its banks are pleasantly uninterested in tourism.