The largest Bismarck monument in the world: a 34-metre granite colossus above the Elbe, carved as a medieval Roland knight and hiding a warren of wartime chambers inside its hollow plinth.

Hamburg's beloved baroque landmark church, crowned by a green copper tower that has guided sailors home up the Elbe for centuries. Locals simply call it the Michel.

Hamburg's smallest and most beloved monument: the bronze statue of Henriette Müller, the tiny 19th-century lemon seller whose cry of "Zitroon! Zitroon!" once echoed through these streets.

Hamburg's oldest surviving street, a row of merchant houses on the Nikolaifleet dating to the 17th-19th centuries, spared by a shift in the wind during the Great Fire of 1842 and by the bombs of the Second World War.

The blackened, hollow spire of a bombed neo-Gothic church, kept as a ruin to stand as Hamburg's most solemn memorial against war. Once the tallest building on earth, it now shelters a viewing platform and a crypt museum beneath its broken walls.

Hamburg's opulent neo-Renaissance city hall, a defiant palace of the merchant republic rising above the bustling Rathausmarkt. Behind its emperor-lined facade sit 647 rooms and a hidden Italianate courtyard.

Hamburg's answer to Venice: gleaming white arcades along the Kleine Alster, built after the Great Fire of 1842, with the city's pampered swans gliding past and hidden art nouveau frescoes in the Mellin-Passage.

The quiet green square where Hamburg began: site of the 9th-century Hammaburg fortress that gave the city its name, and of the vanished Mariendom cathedral, its footprint traced today by sweeping white benches.

A colossal wedge of dark brick that rears up like the prow of an ocean liner cutting through the heart of the city. This is Hamburg's boldest architectural statement, a UNESCO World Heritage masterpiece born from a fortune made in Chilean saltpetre.

A city of red-brick warehouses laced with narrow canals, the largest such complex in the world. Its neo-Gothic gables rise straight out of the water on a foundation of oak.

Altstadt