Hamburg is a city that has been rebuilt twice within living memory. A fire in May 1842 destroyed roughly a third of the old city center, and bombing in 1943 destroyed much of it again. We spent a full day inside and around the Speicherstadt, the largest warehouse district in the world built on a single set of wooden piles, moving between five stops. Each one explains a different piece of how the city came to look the way it does now.

Hamburg holds a great deal more than these five stops we visited. The Hamburger Kunsthalle covers eight centuries of painting across three connected buildings on the city’s Kunstmeile. A short walk from it, the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, founded in 1877, holds four thousand years of design across European, East Asian, and Islamic collections. The Museum of Hamburg History, open since 1922, keeps its own scale model of the historic port. None of these fit into this visit. Our Schengen days are limited, and a ferry to the UK out of the Schengen area was already booked, so this day was what the schedule allowed. Hamburg’s other museums stay on the list for a later trip back.