Berlin's Festival of Lights sites

Map of 16 locations in Berlin, Germany

Ten nights in October, lights on from 19:00 to 23:00, around forty buildings borrowed as projection surfaces and then handed back to ordinary street lighting. This is the 2026 roster checked against the city's official A-Z rather than the sites that keep circulating in old photo galleries: the Mitte chain you can walk in one evening, the Potsdamer Platz knot that needs a second, and the outliers at Tempelhof and the Olympiastadion that need a train. Watching from the street costs nothing everywhere; only the cathedral's interior shows are ticketed.

Places in this collection

  • The Playce — Listed officially as The Playce (Potsdamer Platz Arkaden), the mall at Alte Potsdamer Straße 7 opened in 1998 and was renamed after its 202…
  • Siegessäule — The column in the Tiergarten is one of the historic monuments the festival returns to rather than a new partner facade, and it appears unde…
  • Oberbaumbrücke — The brick double-decker over the Spree takes the loudest and most saturated colour treatment of the 2026 programme, a long way from the res…
  • Alte Potsdamer Straße — The one site in the programme where the buildings are left dark: lit butterflies are flown through the pedestrian lane instead, listed offi…
  • Olympiastadion Berlin — Werner March's stadium of 1936 joins the Festival of Lights for the first time in 2026, the furthest west the programme has reached and a s…
  • Hotel de Rome — visitBerlin takes a facade of its own for the first time in 2026, projecting onto the hotel at Behrenstraße 37 under the slogan "Berlin. Le…
  • THF Tower — The tower on the former Tempelhof airport is one of the two 2026 locations outside the inner-city clusters, named alongside the Funkturm as…
  • Victory Column — The column has been among the festival's recurring canvases since the first edition in 2005 and was photographed lit during the 2009 progra…
  • Gendarmenmarkt — The square's three set pieces, the Konzerthaus as Schauspielhaus am Gendarmenmarkt and the two domed churches, give the festival a symmetri…
  • Potsdamer Platz — The densest cluster in the programme: several facades, two squares and a set of sight lines all within a few hundred metres, listed officia…
  • Fernsehturm — The tower is the festival's orientation point rather than a facade: it is visible from most of the Mitte sites, which is why the suggested…
  • Museumsinsel — The island is on the festival's list of classical highlights, and its draw is the water: the facades face the Spree and the Kupfergraben, s…
  • Humboldt Forum — The reconstructed Schloss facade on Schloßplatz is a late addition to the festival's roster of surfaces and sits between the cathedral and…
  • Bebelplatz — The square is projected on from three sides at once, with music running under the sequence, so the Juristische Fakultät, the Staatsoper, Ho…
  • Berliner Dom — From the ferry landing on the Spree side, the dome does the work: the drum and the facade are the surfaces the mapping is cut for, which is…
  • Brandenburger Tor — The gate is the fixed point of the festival: the Original Berlin Walks Lightseeing tour forms up outside the tourist information at Pariser…

Related collections