Explore Potsdam

The Dutch Quarter is a historic neighbourhood in central Potsdam, built from 1733 to 1740 by the Dutch architect Jan Bouman for King Frederick William I, who invited Dutch craftsmen to settle there. Its 134 gabled red-brick houses now hold shops, cafés and galleries along four tree-lined streets.

Museum Barberini is an art museum in Potsdam, opened in 2017 inside a reconstruction of the 18th-century Palast Barberini on the Alter Markt. Centred on the collection of founder Hasso Plattner, it presents three temporary exhibitions a year ranging from Old Masters to Impressionism and contemporary art.

The Brandenburg Gate is a triumphal arch on Luisenplatz in Potsdam, built in 1770-71 by Carl von Gontard and Georg Christian Unger for Frederick II to mark his victories in the Seven Years' War. Its city-facing and country-facing sides were each designed in a different Corinthian style by the two architects.

Sanssouci is the Rococo summer palace Frederick the Great had built between 1745 and 1747 on a terraced vineyard hill in Potsdam, designed by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff. Containing just ten principal rooms, the single-storey villa was meant as a private retreat, and gives its name to the surrounding park of palaces and follies.

The Chinese House is a circular garden pavilion in Sanssouci Park, built from 1755 to 1764 for Frederick the Great by architect Johann Gottfried Büring. Gilded sandstone figures in Chinoiserie style surround its colonnade, and the pavilion originally served as a setting for summer meals and small social gatherings.

Glienicke Bridge is a steel truss bridge across the Havel River, linking Berlin's Wannsee district with Potsdam. The current structure, the fourth on the site, was completed in 1907. During the Cold War it marked the border between West Berlin and East Germany and was used several times to exchange captured spies, earning it the nickname Bridge of Spies.

The New Palace is a large Baroque palace on the western edge of Sanssouci Park, built from 1763 to 1769 for Frederick the Great after the Seven Years' War. It holds grand banquet halls, galleries of 18th-century art and a Baroque palace theatre, and is considered the last great Prussian Baroque palace.