Charlottenburg Palace

In the west of the city, beyond a wide forecourt, a long Baroque palace of pale stone and a green-domed tower stretches behind formal gardens, the grandest royal residence in Berlin. This is Charlottenburg Palace, a survivor of the city's royal age and a window into the splendour of its old ruling house.

The palace was begun at the end of the seventeenth century as a summer home for a queen, and grew over the following century into a sprawling royal residence, wing added to wing by successive rulers.

Inside, the state rooms are a feast of Baroque and later decoration, gilded halls, a famous chamber lined with porcelain, painted ceilings, and the apartments of kings and queens, furnished to recall the court that lived here.

The palace was badly damaged in the war and painstakingly restored over the decades, so the splendour you see is a careful reconstruction, a deliberate act of recovering the city's lost heritage.

Behind the palace lie extensive gardens, laid out first in a formal style and later in a looser, landscaped manner, with lawns, avenues, a lake, and garden buildings, free to walk and lovely in fine weather.

Among the garden buildings are a mausoleum and pavilions holding more of the royal collection, so the grounds reward a wander beyond the main palace, with quiet corners away from the state rooms.

The palace sits in a pleasant western district, away from the busiest tourist core, so it is usually calmer than the central sights, and the gardens are a favourite with local families.

It gives a fuller picture of the royal, imperial Berlin that the wars and the division did so much to erase, a reminder that this was once the seat of kings as well as a modern, divided city.

The interiors are visited by ticket, often room by room with an audio guide, while the gardens are free, so you can choose how deep to go depending on your time and interest.

The contrast with the rest of the city is striking: where central Berlin is modern, raw, and marked by the twentieth century, here is the calm, gilded world of the old monarchy, carefully kept.

Walk the gilded state rooms, then out into the gardens behind, and the splendour of the city's royal past, lost and rebuilt, surrounds you. When you leave through the forecourt, the modern western city resumes beyond the palace gates.