September 2022 saw us finally check Germany off the travel list. You’d perhaps think that with us living in Europe and with Germany being one of those big, fairly central, pretty important countries with loads of interesting history and sights, we’d have been before, but as I’ve mentioned in the past we have tended to travel further afield while we’ve been relatively young. Very relatively, and getting less relatively by the day.
The first stop on our Island Princess Western Europe cruise was the port of Hamburg. When we visit countries and ports for the first time we almost always book an excursion to get a feel for the place, check off some obvious highlights, or, to mix it up, look for something a little out of the ordinary so that we’re not simply doing the same old tourist things that other cruisers and general travellers do. For Hamburg our options were of the city tour variety or the very long travel to Berlin variety. The latter didn’t appeal for this first German visit, and with the amount of time we had in port and the proximity of the port to the centre of the city we figured we’d be able to explore on foot just as easily. That also meant we didn’t have to set a stupidly early alarm call, and we like not having to do that.
The views of Hamburg from our balcony and from the top of Island Princess weren’t particularly lovely or even mildly interesting, but working port areas in cities often aren’t. Our docking location in the city was at the Altona terminal.
Our original plan was to walk towards the city centre from the port, which we estimated would take a little over an hour when allowing for photo stops, but Princess Cruises had laid on a free shuttle bus service into the town hall square. On a previous cruise with Princess the buses had not been complimentary so we’d not factored this into our reckoning, but now realised that while this might mean we’d miss a few sights on the walk, by taking the bus we could be certain where it was located should we decide that might be the best way to return to the ship later in the day. This would prove to be sensible thinking.
The town hall (well, city hall really, but whatever) is a late nineteenth century building leaning heavily on the considerably earlier Italian renaissance design. The extravagant look was the result of wealth and prestige celebrating the defeat of France by Prussia and the formation of the German empire. The copper roofing, popular at the time as you’ll find in lots of places around Europe when you travel, has now turned green with oxidisation.
The square in front of the hall was largely empty, but the decorations around the bases of the flag poles and the Heinrich Heine Monument by Waldemar Otto attracted a moment’s attention from me.
Our plan to start the day in Hamburg was to head broadly south-southwest from the town hall square towards the former Hanseatic Trade Centre in Speicherstadt, the largest warehouse district in the world built on timber-pile foundations, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site as a result. Our fairly short walk took us to some of the waterways that cross the city of Hamburg and facilitated a lot of the trade for which the warehouses and associated businesses were needed.
The red brick buildings of Speicherstadt were very impressive if you like bold displays of industrialisation. We do.
We crossed over the final canal – Zollkanal (or Customs Canal) which formed the customs barrier of the city and its freeport until 2003 – via the Brooksbrücke Bridge. You’ll never have to look for long if you’re looking for a bridge in Hamburg as it has the highest number of bridges in Europe (around two and a half thousand, if you want to visit them all). Brooksbrücke in its current form was completed in 1887, although a bridge had crossed the water here for centuries before, and one feature of its arched steel framework worth noting is the four different statues at the end of each span; two on the northern side, and two on the southern. Sadly, these are recent replacements for ones that had been present prior to World War II, but they’re still interesting, representing the historical figures of Frederick Barbarossa, Hammonia (or Hamburg), Europe, and St Ansgar.
This brought us to the first place we wanted to visit in the city, and in the next post in this cruise travelogue series we’ll start to look around one of the absolute best things to do in Hamburg (in my opinion), and a place we ended up spending way more time in than we’d expected (and that still wasn’t enough), Miniatur Wunderland.