Hamburg Airport Layover Without Leaving HAM

Hamburg Airport’s Airport Plaza, the hall linking its two terminals, is open to anyone without a boarding pass, and one stop south on the airport train, Ohlsdorf Cemetery spreads about 390 hectares of landscaped parkland with two public bus routes running through it.

Ohlsdorf Cemetery is laid out as a park, with bus routes running through it

Ohlsdorf Cemetery is the largest park cemetery in the world and covers more ground than Central Park does: close to 390 hectares of lawns, ponds, avenues and woodland, with more than 1.5 million burials across some 280,000 grave sites since it opened in 1877. Around 450 species of tree grow in it, twelve chapels stand at intervals through the grounds, and seventeen kilometres of road run between them.

The scale is the reason it has its own public transport. Two bus lines run circuits inside the walls, sharing 25 stops between them, and they are ordinary city buses on the ordinary city fare rather than a tourist shuttle, so a city travel card bought before you land through a tours and activities platform covers the ride out from the terminal and every stop inside the grounds on the same ticket.

Ohlsdorf station is one stop from the airport and the cemetery entrance is three minutes’ walk from it, which makes this the only genuinely green thing within reach of a two-hour connection. Entry costs nothing and the pedestrian gates are open 7am to 9pm daily, all year.

Airport Plaza sits landside between Hamburg Airport’s two terminals

Hamburg Airport has been on this ground since 10 January 1911, when a company formed to build an airship hangar big enough for two Zeppelins bought forty-five hectares of grassland outside the village of Fuhlsbüttel. It is still there, which makes it one of the oldest airports anywhere still handling scheduled flights, and the only part of the original grass field left is the location itself.

What connects Terminals 1 and 2 today is Airport Plaza, a glass-roofed hall that sits entirely landside: no boarding pass needed, so it works for an early arrival, a long connection, or waiting on someone else’s flight. Restaurants, a pharmacy and a full EDEKA supermarket are all in the public area, which is a rarer thing at an airport than it sounds, and considerably cheaper than the airside equivalents. The airport has no self-service lockers at all, only a staffed left-luggage counter on Terminal 2’s arrivals level running roughly 4:30am to 11pm, so a bag you want off your hands outside those hours needs a plan made before you land.

The airport train reaches Hamburg’s centre in 25 minutes

The S1 leaves from a station directly beneath the terminal building and takes about 25 minutes to Hamburg Hauptbahnhof, every 10 minutes from roughly 6am to 11pm and every 20 minutes either side of that, at 4.10 euros for a single from a machine. That is the threshold to weigh: under two and a half hours, the plaza and Ohlsdorf are the sensible ceiling, and past four hours the warehouse district, the concert hall’s public deck and the tunnel under the river all open up on the full Hamburg route instead.

Coming back is where people get caught out. The train divides at Ohlsdorf, one stop short of the terminal: the front three carriages continue to the airport, the rear three go to Poppenbüttel, and the announcement is easy to miss. Anyone heading back from the cemetery is boarding at exactly the station where that split happens, so it pays to be at the front end of the platform.

A connection here is short enough that the walk between the bag counter, the plaza and the platform is a real part of the budget rather than a rounding error. Leaving the suitcase somewhere and moving without it is what buys back the difference.