It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and the meeting place across from Starbucks was packed with people. Tours were done in Spanish and the English group was divided for two guides. We went to the group guided by Ian which by the way was excellent. A Ukrainian with good humor who loved what he was doing and was in love with the city of Hamburg.
We started in front of a bridge and he commented that Hamburg is the city with more bridges in the world, more than 2500. The city is the second largest of Germany and has more than 1.8 million inhabitants.
At this time he told a little of the history of Hamburg and the famous great fire, which destroyed several parts of the city. From there we left for the city hall where he told a little of its history and then to the Church of St. Peter, where we entered for 5 minutes.
After a walk we visited the Stone Street and Expressionist buildings called Brickstone. Chile Haus, one of the most famous has a shape similar to a ship and is called that because those who built liked Chile. After that we passed a factory that supplied supplies to the gas chambers of Auschwietz and which today is a chocolate factory.
We then visit the site where the famous fire started in Hamburg. An interesting aspect is that today it is a restaurant and it is called “beginning of the fire”. On the left side of them you can see old buildings, as they were not hit by the fire and on the right side only new buildings, all rebuilt, as the wind was going towards them.
We then visited a destroyed church, which at the time was Europe’s largest tower, and at 1 pm we took a half-hour break for a snack and continued on to Speicherstadt, the warehouse city. This area formerly was the place where several fishermen and workers of the port lived and they were expelled from the place so that a great city of warehouses for the goods of the port was created. The buildings have a specific format so that ships can be filled with merchandise.
In the last part of the tour he talked about the Opera, an unfinished and super-billed work of the city and we finished the tour with a legend of the Klaus freak, where the tourists themselves were called to act in a brief theatrical presentation coordinated by the guide.
