"Winter in Hamburg!" a Hamburg Travel Page by Carletto76

It's the end of February 2004 and, thanks to Ryan Air, I get the chance to spend 4 days between the 2 Hanseatic towns of Hamburg and Lübeck.

We were fearing to find snow storms and polar termperatures, while instead we had quite a good weather and temperatures always around 0 degrees Celsius, so nothing impossible to survive with!

We had a great time in the second biggest city in Germany, so here is a little description of what we saw!

Everything in Hamburg lives around the harbour, one of the biggest in Europe, and incredibly 120 Km far from the seaside, along the river Elbe.

We took one of the small boats for a tour of the harbour: you can choose between 1 or 2 hours tours... I think 1 is enough, expecially in winter, when you get really cold on an open air boat!

The harbour is incredibly HUGE and it remembered me a bit of my hometown Genova, with all the containers, the big ships, petroleum tanks and so on... ok, that's very "industrial", but also fascinating!

But the harbour can be also very picturesque: the Speicherstadt is an incredible "storage district" with its big, brown buildings where spices and any kind of goods are still now put in storage. Surely the Speicherstadt is the most interesting part of the Harbour, close to the Altstadt.

In German Altstadt means old-town, but unfortunately really few things of the old town still exist in Hamburg, destroyed by WWII.

But there are still many interesting things to see! At first, coming from the Speicherstadt, there are the wonderful Hanseatic houses between Deicherstraße and a canal in the back.
Close from Deichstrasse there are the ruins of St.Nikolai church, very impressive; they are there to remember the atrocities of the war.

Some of the most interesting buildings you can find in the Altstadt were built in the '20s, like the incredibly big, brown and full of windows Chilehaus.

Going to the alstadt without seeing the Rathaus and the big square in front of it would be a pity! Another great view of central Hamburg, with modern and Renaissance buildings close to each other in a really nice way.

We saw many other beautiful things in the Neustadt, St.Pauli, Shanzenviertel and Altona, but I have no more space here, let's talk about them in the other pages! ;-)