Museumsinsel (Museum Island), Berlin

The very idea of the public museum, born of the 18th-century Enlightenment, reached its grandest expression on a spit of land in the Spree. Berlin's Museum Island gathers five great museums built between 1824 and 1930, each conceived to fit the collections it holds, together tracing the development of civilizations and of museum design itself across more than a century. UNESCO inscribed the Museumsinsel as a World Heritage Site in 1999.