Hotels in Potsdam

Potsdam is Prussia's royal showpiece and Brandenburg's state capital, a lake-ringed city where Frederick the Great built Sanssouci as his summer retreat and later kings filled the surrounding parkland with palaces, follies and formal gardens, now protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Twentieth-century history is just as present: the Allied leaders carved up postwar Germany at Cecilienhof in 1945, and the Glienicke Bridge to Berlin became the Cold War's famous spy-swap crossing.

Film buffs come for the Babelsberg studios, among the oldest in the world. Be honest: most visitors treat Potsdam as a day trip from Berlin, so Sanssouci gets crowded in summer while evenings turn quiet, and parts of the rebuilt centre can feel more reconstruction than living old town. Combine it with the Spandau Citadel on the way in from Berlin's western edge. Stay around the Dutch Quarter and Brandenburger Strasse for walkable restaurants and an easy stroll to Sanssouci.