Spandau Citadel

Spandau Citadel stands on an island at the confluence of the Havel and Spree rivers in Berlin's Spandau district, built between 1559 and 1594 atop the remains of an earlier medieval fortress documented from 1157. Its Italian-style bastion layout, considered one of the best-preserved Renaissance military structures in Europe, passed through several hands during construction, beginning with Christoph Romer in 1560, continuing under Francesco Chiaramella de Gandino from 1562, and completed under Rochus Graf zu Lynar from 1578 onward. At its center rises the Julius Tower, an older keep given a castellated stone top by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1838, long after the surrounding bastions were finished. In a far darker chapter, the citadel housed the German Army's Gas Protection Laboratory from 1935, a facility where nerve agent research and development took place under the Nazi regime. Today the fortress operates as a museum and, since 2005, as the open-air venue for the Citadel Music Festival.