I’m a photographer from Brazil, based in Berlin. I’m attached to this city since 5 years and I have been trying it out from top to bottom, from inside out. Here are some of my personal highlights.
The is an old geisterbahnhof, or railway station, in the Prenzlauer Berg district of Berlin, Germany. It is served by the Berlin S-Bahn and the M13 line of the Berlin Straßenbahn. The station opened on October 1, 1935, at the junction of the Nordbahn line from Berlin to Stralsund with the railway line to Szczecin where the eponymous street named after Bornholm Island crossed the tracks. As Bornholmer Straße station lay right at the Berlin Wall it was closed on August 13, 1961, turning it into one of Berlin's ghost stations, passed by eastern and western S-Bahn trains without stopping. After German reunification Bornholmer Straße was reopened on December 22, 1990. Today, you can still go there to see remnants of the wall, and where people flooded in when the wall came down in 1989. (In the evening of November 9, 1989, thousands of East Berliners and GDR citizens assembled at the bridge demanding entry to West Berlin. At 9.20 p.m. local guards were the first to open the checkpoint and allow people passing through freely to West Berlin, where they were greeted enthusiastically. The event marked the commencement of the fall of the Berlin Wall.).
What’s not to like about The Sammlung Boros Collection? It’s a brilliant private collection of contemporary art held captive in a monstrous, symmetrical ex-Nazi bunker with two metre thick concrete walls, dominating an area of a thousand metres squared. It also doubled as a hardcore techno and fetish club in the ‘90s, of which traces linger in every corner.
This place is like being in the Canary Islands, where my hometown is. The wonderful botanical garden has around 22.000 different plant species. I can find here all the tropical species from the island where i grew up: birds of Paradise, palms or dragon trees.
Berlin has plenty of magic cafés in every corner. This is one of them. It's quiet and it has a mixture of lights and furniture that really catches me. Cakes and coffees are also very tasty.