Museum Village of Duppel - Pfaueninsel - Tropical islands resort

Route: Berlin - Museum Village of Duppel - Pfaueninsel - Tropical islands resort - Berlin
Duration: 10 h
Firstly we will visit to Museum Village Duppel which is a seasonal open-air museum. It presents visitors with a reconstruction of an approximately 800-year-old village.The buildings are constructed using medieval tools and techniques. Take a journey into rural life in the Middle Ages. Behind a high oak palisade, thatched wooden houses are arranged around the horseshoe shaped village green. There are no windows, and some roofs reach all the way to the ground. Smell the tar and charcoal in the air. Learn about the physical nature of medieval farming and see an old plough. Everything is reconstructed exactly as it was; the bakery with its bread oven, the blacksmith, pottery and the grain store are exactly as they would have been. The village is surrounded by forests, meadows and pastures with sheep, oxen and goats. The willow meadows have been allowed to regrow. Skudden sheep, typical of the Middle Ages, can be seen here too. In the orchards, the trees are full of apples, quince and plums - all traditional species. Next we will visit to the Peacock Island where is a white fairy-tale castle and spreading parkland, complete with peacocks! This island in the River Havel was settled thousands of years ago. From the Iron Age bronze bangles, bracelets and hair spirals found here, we know that people were living on the island around 2,500 years ago. In the seventeenth century, Friedrich Wilhelm, Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, set up a glass works on the island. This was an ideal location for chemist and glass maker Johannes Kunckel to conduct his experiments into making pure and coloured glass. But when his patron died and the foundry burnt down, Kunckel found himself in some considerable difficulty. Ultimately, his search for a new employer took him to the court of Charles XI in Stockholm. The island lay forgotten for one hundred years, until it was discovered by the pleasure-loving Friedrich Wilhelm II, King of Prussia. Even as a young crown prince, he liked the island as a venue for a clandestine rendezvous with his mistress Wilhelmine Enke, later Countess Wilhelmine von Lichtenau. Between 1794 and 1797, Friedrich Wilhelm II had a little summer palace built on the island. Designed as a ruin in the popular Romantic style of the day, the palace was supposed to evoke a “derelict rural Roman villa”. The exterior resembles white marble, though that too belongs to the illusion – the walls are actually painted wood. The little white palace, set in a prominent clearing at the end of the island, also created a distinctive landmark – an eye-catching feature for one of the vistas from the New Garden in Potsdam. Even today, visitors and locals alike are charmed by the view of the palace’s two flanking white towers joined by a cast iron bridge set against the backdrop of trees. Peacock Island is now under the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg and inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage. Next we will visit to the Tropical Islands Resort which  is a tropical water park located in the former Brand-Briesen Airfield in Halbe. It is housed in a former airship hangar (known as the Aerium), the biggest free-standing hall in the world. Tropical Islands has a world record for the largest indoor waterpark. It is also the fourth-largest building in the world by usable volume. With artificial sunlight, year-round heating, and a sprawling sandy beach, it can fit 6,000 guests at a time. Sunsets are played on video screens for guests who decide to spend the night in a tent on the fake beach along the lapping, human-controlled waters, or lounge in one of the pristine cottages. Also there balloon rides soar above the installed tropical forest where birds fly free. After free and relax time we return to Berlin.
Price: per person