Dog Parks & Walks in Berlin

Berlin's central park spans 210 hectares of woodland, meadows, and lakes right in the heart of the city. The Tiergarten is a serious park — genuinely wild in places, with tall trees, dense undergrowth, and winding paths that can make you forget you're in a capital city. Dogs are welcome throughout and there are several designated off-leash areas, including the meadows around the Neuer See. The Café am Neuen See (see restaurants) is the natural halfway stop. On warm weekends, this park feels like the entire city is having a picnic with their dogs.

Berlin's oldest public park (1848), Volkspark Friedrichshain occupies 52 hectares in the heart of East Berlin's most vibrant neighbourhoods. The park has several large off-leash areas including the Hundewiese (dog meadow) near the north entrance, which is one of the best-maintained dedicated dog zones in the city. The hills — actually anti-aircraft bunkers from WWII covered in soil — give excellent views over the city. The surrounding streets of Friedrichshain are uniformly dog-friendly.

The Grunewald is Berlin's largest green space: 3,000 hectares of pine and birch forest on the western edge of the city, running along the Havel river and the Wannsee lake. Dogs can run freely throughout most of the forest, and the combination of woodland trails, river banks, and sandy lakeside beaches makes it the ultimate dog outing in Berlin. The Hundestrand at Wannsee (see beaches section) is accessible from within the forest. Multiple S-Bahn stations serve the forest, making it easily reachable without a car.

The former Tempelhof Airport — closed in 2008 and converted into a public park — is one of the most extraordinary urban spaces in Europe. The old runways and taxiways stretch for kilometres across a completely flat, open plain in the middle of south Berlin. Dogs must be on-leash on the old runways (to protect nesting birds), but there are designated off-leash meadow areas at the edges of the field. The sense of space is unlike anything else in a European capital. On a summer evening, the sunset over the field, with hundreds of Berliners cycling, kite-surfing, and walking their dogs, is a remarkable sight.