French Cathedral, Berlin

French Cathedral, Berlin tickets: which one to buy

The French Cathedral stands on the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin's Mitte district, facing an almost identical domed building across the square and with the concert hall between them, and it is really two things joined together: a small Huguenot church, and a large domed tower built beside it for show. The church is free to enter when open. The tower houses a museum about the Huguenots in Berlin and a viewing gallery reached by a long staircase, both with a small charge.

The gallery gives a fine view over the square and the centre of the city, including the television tower and the museum island. Walking tours of central Berlin usually stop on the square for its architecture and its history, and bike tours pass through it. Organ recitals are held in the church. Concert tickets for the hall opposite are sold separately and are the other reason to come back in the evening. Tickets for the tower are sold at the museum desk on the ground floor.

Visiting French Cathedral, Berlin: what to see

French Protestant refugees came to Berlin in large numbers after 1685, invited by the Elector of Brandenburg, and they soon made up a significant share of the city's population. Their church on this square was built between 1701 and 1705, a plain building modelled on the Huguenot temple at Charenton near Paris. Eighty years later, Frederick the Great ordered the square to be monumentalised in imitation of Rome's Piazza del Popolo, and Carl von Gontard designed identical domed towers beside the French church and the German church opposite, completed in 1785.

The towers were never part of the churches and serve no religious purpose; they exist purely for the view of the square. Both buildings were gutted in the Second World War and rebuilt in the 1980s. The museum in the tower tells the story of the Huguenot community, its crafts and its role in the city, with documents and objects brought from France. The viewing gallery runs round the outside of the drum just below the dome and is open on all sides.

French Cathedral, Berlin opening hours and the best time to go

The tower and museum are open most days, with shorter hours in winter and occasional closures for events; the climb has no lift. The Gendarmenmarkt is at its best in the evening when the buildings are lit and concertgoers gather, and in December when a Christmas market fills the square, though that market is ticketed and busy. Summer brings open-air concerts on the square in some years. Berlin is pleasant from May to September and cold in winter.

The church hosts services on Sundays and closes to visitors then. The Friedrichstrasse shops, the Unter den Linden boulevard and the museum island are all within fifteen minutes on foot. Allow forty-five minutes for the tower, the gallery and the museum, and cross the square to compare the German church twin. The German church opposite holds a free exhibition on German parliamentary history.