Großer Tiergarten

The Grosser Tiergarten is Berlin's central 210-hectare park, between the Brandenburg Gate, the main station and the zoo. From the electoral hunting ground of the sixteenth century, Frederick the Great turned it into a public pleasure wood from 1742; in the nineteenth century Peter Joseph Lenne reshaped it in the English landscape style with lakes, bridges and sight lines. Two world wars left deep scars, and in the hunger years after 1945 almost every tree was burnt for fuel, so today's woodland is largely a replanting from the 1950s. At the Grosser Stern in the center rises the Victory Column with its gilded Victoria. Berliners run, picnic and sunbathe here or visit the Goethe and Bismarck monuments along the Strasse des 17. Juni.