Every design for Kiel

Picture the Kieler Förde during Kiel Week, crowded with sails. The annual regatta is the biggest sailing event in the world, and it sums up a city that has always lived from the water: naval base, shipbuilding centre and ferry port for Sweden, Norway and Lithuania. The Olympic sailing competitions of 1936 and 1972 were held in the Bay of Kiel. Away from the water, Kiel means THW Kiel handball, Holstein Kiel football and Kieler Sprotten.

The city also carries the memory of a rebellion. In the last weeks of the First World War its sailors refused orders to sail against the British Navy, sparking the revolution that ended with the Kaiser's abdication and the birth of the Weimar Republic. Kiel was a Hanseatic town long before that, founded as Holstenstadt tom Kyle in 1233, and the busiest artificial waterway in the world, the Kiel Canal, still ends here in Holtenau.

The Schifffahrtsmuseum and the Museumshafen keep that maritime story right on the waterfront, and a map of Kiel shows why: there is hardly a street that does not lead down to the Förde.