Tempelhofer Feld: Which Gate to Use and How to Get Out After Closing
There is a moment on Tempelhofer Feld that nobody warns you about. You have walked out onto the old runway, the sky is enormous, the city has dropped away, and then you turn round and realise you cannot see the gate you came in through. It is somewhere back there, past two kilometres of grass, and the light is going.
That is the honest problem with Berlin's most-loved free space. It is not hard to enjoy. It is hard to arrive at properly. The airfield is about 300 hectares of open ground with ten public gates spread around a fence that runs seven and a half kilometres, and the distance from the west gate to the east gate is 2,246 metres. Whatever you came here to do sits at one end of that, and the gate you pick decides whether you reach it in three minutes or twenty-three.
The south runway looking east at dusk. The people on the horizon are roughly where the far fence is.
Berlin locks the gates, and the time changes every month
Tempelhofer Feld is free and it has no ticket, but it is not a public street. It closes.
The operator, Grün Berlin, sets the hours by season, and the shift between months is bigger than people expect:
August: 06:00 to 22:30
September: 06:30 to 21:30
October: 07:00 to 19:00
November: 07:00 to 18:00
December and January: 07:30 to 17:00
June and July: 06:00 to 23:00
Read the August and October lines next to each other. Between the two, the field loses three and a half hours of evening. The step down on 1 September alone takes an hour off the end of the day and pushes the morning opening half an hour later, which matters if you were planning a sunrise walk on the concrete.
There is no grace period and no warning bell that carries across 300 hectares. At closing time the gates are shut, and the park supervision staff move people towards the exits before that.
Sunrise from the runway. In August the gates open at 06:00, in September at 06:30, and in December not until 07:30.
The five gates that still let you out
Here is the part that is genuinely useful and almost never written down in English.
If you are still inside when the gates close, you are not trapped. Five of the ten gates keep a full-height turnstile that works at any hour, and they let you walk out. They do not let anyone in.
Those five are:
Tempelhofer Damm, the main west gate at S+U Tempelhof
Columbiadamm, the main north gate
Oderstraße / Herrfurthstraße, the main east gate
Oderstraße / Crash Gate
Leinestraße, at the south-east corner
Worth knowing: the operator's own FAQ page lists only four of these and leaves Leinestraße out, while its visitor-information page lists all five. The five-gate version matches what is physically on the fence. If you are relying on Leinestraße after dark, that is fine, but I would not build a plan around a gate that one official page forgets.
A turnstile is a slow way to leave. It is a narrow metal cage that turns one person at a time, and you will be lifting a bike over your shoulder or shuffling a buggy through it sideways. My advice: if you have a bike, a pram, a dog or a picnic to carry, be out fifteen minutes before closing rather than at it. I have made that mistake before, and the last five minutes of a beautiful evening turned into an argument with a piece of metal.
The other five gates are simply locked, and three of them are the Oderstraße side gates people from Neukölln use every day.
Pick your gate by what you came for, not by what is nearest
This is where the size of the place does its damage. Everything on Tempelhofer Feld is clustered, and the clusters are at opposite ends.
If you came to barbecue, go to Columbiadamm. Grilling is allowed in three marked areas only, and all three sit at the northern end. From the Columbiadamm main gate they are 175 metres away. From the Tempelhofer Damm gate on the far west side, the same three grills are 1,737 metres away, which is a twenty-minute walk carrying charcoal. Bus M43 stops at Friedhöfe Columbiadamm, forty-six metres from that gate, and the same M43 runs from U Boddinstraße on the U8.
Two rules that get people turned away at the grill: the grill must stand on legs at least 25 cm high so it does not burn the turf, and footless disposable trays and gas grills are not allowed.
If you came for the community gardens and the café row, use Oderstraße. Allmende-Kontor, Rübezahl and Stadtteilgarten Schillerkiez sit together just inside the eastern fence, roughly 75 to 230 metres from the Oderstraße gates, with the Schillerkiez cafés on the street outside. From Tempelhofer Damm they are over two kilometres away.
If you came for the runways and the sky, almost any gate works, and that is the point of the place. The north strip runs 2,073 metres and the south strip 1,867 metres, so both reach nearly the full width of the field. The eastern gates put you on concrete within about a hundred metres; from Tempelhofer Damm it is a little over three hundred.
If you came with a dog, note that dogs must be on the lead everywhere except three fenced dog runs, one in the south-west, one mid-east and one in the south-east near Oderstraße. The Tempelschlucht nature space at the south-eastern corner is set aside for children and is not a dog area.
The scale from above. The far treeline in this picture is roughly a forty-minute round trip from the near fence.
Getting there, checked against live departures
Almost no parking exists, which the operator says plainly, so this is a public transport trip.
West side, the fastest arrival. S+U Tempelhof sits 113 metres from the Tempelhofer Damm main gate. Live departures there today show U6 plus Ringbahn services S41, S42, S46 and S47, so this is the easiest gate to reach from almost anywhere in the city.
North side. Bus M43 to Friedhöfe Columbiadamm, forty-six metres from the Columbiadamm main gate. This is the barbecue and beer-garden entrance.
East side. U8 to Boddinstraße or Leinestraße, then a six to seven minute walk through Schillerkiez to the Oderstraße gates.
North-west side. U6 to Paradestraße, then about 226 metres to the Tor 10 gate.
If you are coming from the historic centre, the U6 from Friedrichstraße runs straight down to Tempelhof, and the Ringbahn is the useful one if you are staying anywhere on the S41/S42 circle.
The bird zone that closes the middle of the field
From roughly late March or early April until the end of August, the inner meadows between the two runways are fenced off and posted with signs. The reason is the skylark, a ground-nesting bird that hides its nest in a scrape in the grass, and Tempelhofer Feld is one of its last real breeding sites inside Berlin.
The closure is real and it is enforced by the park supervision team. A line of bollards runs fifteen metres back from each runway with information boards along it, and the eastern half of the ground south of the southern runway is fenced against entry all year. The operator publishes the whole skylark protection scheme, including the annual bird counts, if you want the detail.
This is not a reason to avoid the field. It is a reason not to plan a picnic in the middle of the grass in June. Stay on the concrete and the outer meadow ring during the nesting months, and keep the dog on the lead there even outside the marked zones.
The skylark sign in the meadow. Where you see these and the red and white tape, the grass behind them is closed.
What is actually there, once you are inside
The field is not empty, it is just spread out.
The runways. Two kilometres of Cold War concrete you can walk, cycle, skate or land-sail on. Pedestrians have priority under the park bylaw, which matters because the wind sports on the north strip move fast.
Beer gardens and food. Tempelgarten and the Hasenschänke at the north end, Neulich and the Luftschloss bar over near Tempelhofer Damm, plus rotating food trucks.
The community gardens. Allmende-Kontor is the well-known one, a dense patchwork of raised beds built out of pallets and crates on the eastern side.
The history trail. Twenty marked stations around the field covering the airport's history, including the Columbia-Haus at the northern edge, which was the only official SS concentration camp inside the city of Berlin between 1934 and 1936, and the wartime forced-labour camp where around 2,400 people were held in 1944. The Berlin Airlift of 1948 and 1949 ran from here too: 278,000 flights and more than 2.1 million tonnes of freight.
That last point is why I treat this as a serious place. The reason Berliners fought so hard to keep it open is partly that they know what it was.
The north runway on a summer afternoon. Skaters and cyclists share it with walkers, and walkers have right of way.
Why the field is still here at all
In 2014 Berliners voted in a referendum against building on the edges of the field, and the result became a law, the Gesetz zum Erhalt des Tempelhofer Felds. It is the reason the horizon in these pictures is unbroken, and it is also the reason nothing much has been added since: events are only permitted on the outer meadow ring, and digging into the ground is not allowed at all.
You can feel that decision when you stand there. A city with Berlin's land prices left three hundred hectares of it as grass and concrete, on purpose.
Tempelgarten at the Columbiadamm end. The beer gardens and the three barbecue areas are all on this side of the field.
How I would spend an afternoon here
One plan, adjusted for the month you are in.
Come in the late afternoon, not the middle of the day, because there is no shade worth the name on that concrete. Enter at S+U Tempelhof, walk east along the northern runway, and let the terminal building fall away behind you. That walk is the thing. About halfway you are as far from a building as it is possible to be inside Berlin.
Then decide by hunger. Carry on east and you reach the gardens and the Schillerkiez cafés and leave through Oderstraße onto the U8. Turn north instead and you reach the beer gardens and the M43. Either way you cross the field once and leave from a different side, which is the only way to see the whole thing without walking it twice.
Check the closing time before you go in, and plan to be at a gate twenty minutes before it. In late August that means starting the crossing by about 21:30; in October it means by 18:00.
If you are stitching a whole Berlin day together, the field pairs badly with a rushed morning and well with a slow one. My free walking tour finishes at Hackescher Markt around lunchtime, which is a straight run down the U8 to Boddinstraße and in through the Oderstraße gates. History in the centre while your legs are fresh, then the widest sky in the city afterwards.
For the rest of the planning, Berlin's best views on foot covers the higher vantage points, where to watch the sunset in Berlin is worth reading alongside the closing-time table above, and Berlin's parks and lakes is the alternative if you want water instead of concrete. The Giant Kite Festival also happens on this field, and the approach is different on an event day.
Opening times, entrance lists, grill rules and the nesting-season closure in this guide were read from the operator's own visitor page and checked on 27 August 2026. Seasonal hours change on the first of the month, so glance at that page again before an evening visit.
Image credits
Source and licence details for the 6 photographs used in this article.
The old Tempelhof runway at dusk: Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Tempelhofer Feld and the Berlin skyline seen from above: A.Savin, Free Art License 1.3, via Wikimedia Commons.
Sunrise over the runway at Tempelhofer Feld: Lukas Beck, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
A skylark protection-zone sign in the meadow at Tempelhofer Feld: Karlunun, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Tempelgarten beer garden on the northern edge of Tempelhofer Feld: Fridolin freudenfett, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The northern runway of Tempelhofer Feld with people on the concrete: Karlunun, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.