The Opening of a Road Tunnel in Berlin

March 26, 2006

The Tunnel Tiergarten Spreebogen in the central area of Berlin was opened to vehicular traffic. This structure is part of the federal highway designated as the Bundesstraße 96, and it serves as a link between Berlin Hauptbahnhof, the main railway station in Germany’s capital city; and the locality (neighborhood) of Tiergarten in the Berlin borough of Mitte. The 1.5- mile (2.4-kilometer) Tunnel Tiergraten Spreebogen is the longest road tunnel in Berlin.

This tunnel was built under one of Berlin’s most popular parks. That park, which likewise carries the name “Tiergarten,” contains gardens and a zoo. (Tiergarten means “Animal Garden” in German.) One of the largest inner-city parks in all of Germany, the Tiergarten is partially bordered on its northern side by an arc (also known as a bend) of the river Spree. Since the German word for arc is “bogen,” that portion of the river is widely referred to as Spreebogen.

The public officials who took part in the opening of the Tunnel Tiergarten Spreebogen to motor vehicles on March 26, 2006, included Wolfgang Tiefensee, Germany’s federal minister for transport, building and urban development; Klaus Wowereit, the governing mayor of Berlin; and Ingeborg Junge-Reyer, the city’s senator for urban development. A week before these inaugural festivities, approximately 60,000 people traveled through the Tunnel Tiergarten Spreebogen by foot. Junge-Reyer, who officiated at the event, gave the go-ahead for walkers and joggers to begin making their way into the tunnel at noon that day.

A couple of years before the Tunnel Tiergarten Spreebogen was opened to the public — and at a time when it was still very much a work in progress — this structure achieved international fame on the big screen. The tunnel specifically appeared in the 2004 action-thriller movie The Bourne Supremacy as the stand-in for a tunnel in Moscow during a high-speed chase scene.  

Photo Credit: L.Willms (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)

For more information on the Tunnel Tiergarten Spreebogen, please check out Tiergarten Spreebogen Tunnel (Berlin-Moabit/Berlin-Tiergarten, 2006) | Structurae