Velten offers two clearly distinct focal points for a stay: Bernsteinsee lake, with swimming and leisure facilities, and the history of stove tiles and ceramics. The Veltener Töppertour (Velten Pottery Trail) links this history to changes in the town and in people’s everyday lives; the museums continue the story through their collections. When planning your trip, you can therefore decide whether water, a themed route or the museums should be the main draw.
Bernsteinsee: swimming and lakeside activities
Bernsteinsee in Velten is 750 metres long and 170 metres wide, and swimming is possible there. Wide sandy beaches and sunbathing areas define the swimming area. A playground and a beach volleyball court add to the activities by the lake. You can tailor your time by the water to your interests, with swimming and sunbathing alongside games and exercise. Velten Water Ski and Wake Park is also located at Bernsteinsee. Its circular course is 720 metres long. The park adds water skiing and wakeboarding to the swimming and lakeside activities.
The Veltener Töppertour
The Veltener Töppertour, around three kilometres long, starts at Bahnhofplatz and ends at the museums. Along the route, 25 information panels explain how the boom in stove tiles changed the town and the everyday lives of its people. The route thus links a specific walk with a story about local ceramic history: it focuses not only on the objects themselves, but also on their significance for the town and everyday life. For children, there is a family version: an interactive children’s tour of around one kilometre, with a digital audio guide. It is considerably shorter than the approximately three-kilometre tour and also differs in being explicitly interactive and designed for children.
Ceramic museums and Velten stove art
The Velten Stove and Ceramics Museum is housed in the former Schmidt-Lehmann stove factory, a listed building, and presents stove art spanning three centuries. It preserves more than 4,000 individual tiles, stove parts, stove ornaments and stove models. The museum also houses well over 2,000 decorative and utilitarian ceramic objects, most of which date from the 1920s and 1930s. These collections provide a tangible context for the history of stove tiles explored on the Töppertour. The Hedwig Bollhagen Museum offers another focus on ceramics, with around 1,600 objects from Hedwig Bollhagen’s ceramic estate on public display. The Stove and Ceramics Museum thus presents a broad historical and material panorama, while the Hedwig Bollhagen Museum focuses on Hedwig Bollhagen’s ceramic estate.
Circular route, cycle paths and getting here
The Velten museums are both the starting and finishing point of the Deutsche Tonstraße, a 215-kilometre circular route. Compared with the approximately three-kilometre Töppertour, this is a much larger route, with the museums serving as a reference point for both. In the area around the stove-making town of Velten, quiet country and forest paths, including routes through the Luchwiesen meadows, invite you to explore by bike.
Velten is served by DB regional train line RB55. Check the current timetable before travelling. Digital information kiosks at the station, on Museumsgasse and at Bernsteinsee provide directions and up-to-date information. For specific questions, it is worth checking the information displayed on site.
Discover more destinations: Ruhlsdorf, Schmöckwitz, Spandau, Rahnsdorf, Köpenick, Kladow, Zehlendorf, Hermsdorf
Return to the main travel overview: Berlin.
