Record number of visitors flock to Berlin

BERLIN, Germany – Berlin saw a new record for the number of tourists visiting in October, figures released on Wednesday revealed. Culture was the city’s number one draw.

Figures from the capital’s state tourism office showed that 1.1 million people visited Berlin in October. This was 3.1 percent more than in September and a city record, the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper reported.

Hotels had a particularly good month with 63 percent of all the city’s beds filled. There were 2.6 million overnight stays across the month in total – an increase on eight percent in September.

The number of tourists visiting from outside Germany rose by 3.6 percent on the previous month while there were 2.3 percent more Germans from outside Berlin making a trip to their capital.

There was also a noticeable increase in the number of Russians holidaying in the city, with 18.5 percent more than the same time last year.

But Brits made up the largest share of foreigners coming to Berlin, with 39,800 gracing the Hauptstadt in October.

Americans making the journey over the Atlantic to see the city dropped by eight percent between this October and the last.

Over half of those asked by the tourism office said that Berlin’s cultural offerings had attracted them to the city.

Ninety percent said that it was the capital’s array of memorials that they were here to visit.

“We have lots of visitors from all over the world,” Hannah Berger from the Berlin Wall Foundation on Bernauer Strasse told the Morgenpost. She explained that it was popular among people who did not speak German or English – the languages in which the descriptions are written.

People who said they were in Berlin to visit museums and take in concerts tended to stay twice as long as those who were not – on average staying 4.2 days.