Teufelsberg

A 120-metre hill made entirely of Second World War rubble, topped with an abandoned Cold War spy station, covered in street art. It's the most Berlin thing in Berlin.

After the war, Berlin had about 75 million cubic metres of rubble — destroyed buildings, broken concrete, twisted steel. They had to put it somewhere, so they dumped twelve million cubic metres of it on top of an unfinished Nazi military-technical college that Albert Speer had designed for the Wehrmacht. Rather than demolish the Nazi building, they just buried it. It's still down there, entombed under a man-made mountain.

The Americans built a signals intelligence station on top during the Cold War — those distinctive geodesic radar domes you can see from across the city were part of the National Security Agency's ECHELON network, listening to Soviet and East German communications. The station closed in 1992 after reunification made it redundant.

Today the ruins are covered in spectacular graffiti and street art. You can take guided tours through the buildings, climb onto the radar domes, and get one of the best views in Berlin — better than the TV Tower, some say, because from here you can see the TV Tower.

The hill's name translates to 'Devil's Mountain,' named after the nearby Teufelssee (Devil's Lake). It's the highest point in western Berlin, and every grain of it is made of a destroyed city.