Strandbad Plötzensee

Beach in Wedding, Pier and Slide

Hardly any of Berlin’s bathing lakes are so centrally located: From the northern shore in Wedding, it’s just a few minutes to the sandy beach, and water access is shallow and uncomplicated. Plötzensee, with an area of about 7.7 hectares and a depth of around seven meters, is a manageable, almost intimate body of water, rated “excellent” in the EU classification for 2021 to 2024. Access to the water is via a long wooden pier, next to which is a water slide. For children, there’s a playground with a large climbing frame, plus a basketball hoop, volleyball, table tennis, and soccer fields. Beach chairs can be rented, sunbathing lawns extend across the grounds, and nude bathing is permitted in a designated, limited area. Food is available from the snack bar and the café in the historic entrance building. Because the lido is so close to the city, the beach fills up quickly on warm days, but the sunbathing lawns offer alternative space away from the shore. Changing rooms and sanitary facilities are part of the lido, and the path from the entrance to the beach is short.

Monument from 1926 and a Political Point of Contention

People have been swimming here longer than at any other bathing lake on this list: an army sports facility already brought the first swimming pool to the lake in 1891, long before the great public baths of Berlin in the 1920s. The entrance building was constructed between 1926 and 1928 and is now a registered monument, the second architectural monument in this selection after Wannsee. The site belongs to an infrastructure company of the Berliner Bäder-Betriebe (Berlin Public Pools), but it is operated by a private leaseholder. This is linked to a conflict that the Senate openly named in 2023: it sees no influence over the tariffs at Plötzensee because the leaseholder must be able to operate economically, and an additional free bathing spot at the lake should not be created for nature conservation reasons. However, the lido is located next to Volkspark Rehberge with an open-air stage and a freely accessible red and fallow deer enclosure, with the Plötzensee Memorial Site very close by. The leaseholder does not publicly announce current admission prices; they must be inquired at the ticket counter. Only older tariffs from a Senate response are documented, including a short-term ticket for two hours.