Explore Hamburg

Chocoversum is a chocolate museum in Hamburg's Kontorhaus quarter, opposite the Speicherstadt and near the Chilehaus. Opened in December 2011, it offers a 90-minute guided tour covering cacao cultivation and chocolate production, ending with tastings of the finished product.

Dialoghaus Hamburg is an exhibition venue in the Speicherstadt, opened in 2000. It houses three experience-based exhibitions: Dialogue in the Dark, led by blind guides through pitch-black rooms; Dialogue in Silence, led by deaf guides; and Dialogue with Time, led by older guides. Each lets visitors swap roles and sense the world differently.

Hamburger Kunsthalle is the art museum of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, one of the largest in Germany. It occupies three connected buildings dating from 1869, 1921 and 1997, between the Hauptbahnhof and the Alster lakes. Its collection spans seven centuries, from medieval North German painting to international contemporary art.

Bucerius Kunst Forum is an exhibition centre in Hamburg's city centre, next to the Rathaus. Founded in 2002 by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius and named after Gerd Bucerius and his wife, it stages three to four temporary exhibitions a year developed with other museums and collections.

A private museum in a former warehouse in HafenCity, opened in 2008 to display Peter Tamm's collection of maritime material. Across nine floors it holds model ships, construction plans, uniforms, maritime art and more than a million photographs, totalling over 40,000 objects.

Spicy's Gewürzmuseum is a privately run spice museum in Hamburg's Speicherstadt, housed in a warehouse at Am Sandtorkai. Founded in 1991 and based there since 1993, it describes itself as the first spice museum in the world. Visitors can see, smell and touch spices from around the globe, with an audio guide included.

Rickmer Rickmers is a three-masted iron barque built in 1896 at the Rickmers shipyard in Bremerhaven for the Hong Kong rice and bamboo trade. Renamed and reflagged several times over her career, including service as a Portuguese Navy training ship, she was bought back by the Hamburg group Windjammer für Hamburg in 1983 and restored as a floating museum moored on the Elbe.

Panoptikum Hamburg is Germany's oldest wax museum, founded in 1879 by woodcarver Friedrich Hermann Faerber on Spielbudenplatz near the Reeperbahn. Still family-run today, it displays wax figures of historical and contemporary public figures; each figure takes up to two years and tens of thousands of euros to produce.

BallinStadt is a museum and memorial park on the Elbe in the Port of Hamburg, on the site of the Hamburg America Line's emigration halls, built in 1901. From the 1850s to the early 1930s, around five million emigrants passed through en route to the Americas. The halls were demolished in 1934, rebuilt true to the original, and opened as a museum in 2007.