Berlin Guide: Where to Touch Grass

There’s a moment, somewhere between hangxiety and heatstroke, when Berlin’s industrial charm stops being romantic and just starts to feel like a dust-coated emotional landfill. The club’s closed, your DMs are full of ghosts, and suddenly someone on Instagram is doing “nature healing” in Brandenburg while you’re chain-smoking in a Lidl parking lot.

Berlin Guide: Where to Touch Grass

But the problem with most of Berlin’s green spaces is that they’re not actually safe. Sure, Tempelhofer Feld is wide enough to fake a sense of spiritual openness, but it’s also where you’re statistically most likely to run into your ex situationship, your former dealer, or that DJ you made out with while thinking of your ex and crying.

So here’s your emotional escape map: a handpicked guide to Berlin’s lesser-known parks, lakes, and forest hideouts. These are the places where you can take your shoes off, dissociate gently under a tree, and not have to worry about who’s watching.

1. Volkspark Rehberge

Location: Wedding

Vibe: Shady forest paths, low traffic, occasional swans

Tucked away in Wedding and blessedly overlooked by the influencer masses, Rehberge is a lowkey sanctuary. It feels more like a tiny national park than a city escape. It has woodsy trails for solo looping, open fields for lying flat in existential silence, and a literal deer enclosure — because even your inner child deserves some weird Berlin tenderness. Not many DJs here. Just squirrels and your own unresolved thoughts.

2. Plänterwald

Location: Treptow

Vibe: Industrial fairytale, slightly haunted

A forest with an abandoned amusement park rotting inside? Yes, it’s giving “emotional decay chic.” Plänterwald is where you go to wander aimlessly and romanticize the mess. It’s quiet. It smells like moss and old dreams. You can sit on a log and write letters you’ll never send. Bonus: the overgrown rollercoaster skeleton is perfect for Instagramming your existential rebirth.

3. Biesdorf Palace Park (Schlosspark Biesdorf)

Location: Marzahn

Vibe: Art hoe meets Jane Austen breakdown

No one expects Marzahn to come through with delicate palace gardens and fountains, but here we are. Biesdorf is for those soft, cinematic afternoons where you read poetry, eat strawberries with your fingers, and pretend you’re the tragic lesbian daughter of a diplomat. Great for healing your mother wound. No techno bros in sight.

4. Rummelsburger See (the quiet end)

Location: Lichtenberg

Vibe: Soft water, soft feelings, soft ghosts

Don’t go to the crowded, party-prone side. Keep walking until the city noise disappears. The quiet end of Rummelsburger See is for swimming alone while pretending you’re in a sad Scandinavian film. If you cry in the water, no one will know. If you journal here, you will end up forgiving someone (possibly yourself).

5. Insel der Jugend (Youth Island)

Location: Treptow

Vibe: Lowkey romantic, slightly cursed

Technically a tiny island, technically the backdrop of a dozen past flings. Go during the weekday. Sit near the bridge. Watch the boats go by and imagine your ex moving to Copenhagen. You’ll feel peace. Maybe even closure. At least until the jazz trio starts soundchecking at the beer garden.

6. Körnerpark

Location: Neukölln

Vibe: Sunken Versailles, but with heartache

This place looks like a royal garden if it were designed by people who chain-smoke and ghost you. It’s got a sunken layout, actual fountains, and just enough overgrown flowers to feel decadent. Bring a disposable camera. Don’t bring your new date. This park is strictly for personal spirals and glamorized emotional repair.

7. Tegeler Forst

Location: Reinickendorf

Vibe: Big trees, big feelings, no cell service

Tegeler Forst is where you go when even walking past a Berghain queue gives you hives. It’s a full-on forest, which means actual trail signs and the possibility of getting lost just enough to hit reset. Pack snacks, turn off your phone, and let the silence do what your ex never could: hold space

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8. Kleiner Müggelsee

Location: Köpenick

Vibe: Lakecore. Secret swimming. Almost too pretty.

Forget the main Müggelsee. This is the smaller, softer sister — with fewer bros and more reflective swimmers. Think cold water therapy meets daydream journaling. This is where you go to start again. Maybe you even flirt with someone, but from a respectful distance. With eye contact and nothing more. You’re different now.

Berlin is full of tiny green portals to something quieter, stranger, softer. Go touch grass.

Just don’t go to Tempelhof every time.