Teufelsberg and Kienberg: Berlin's Wild Sledding Hill and Its Snow-Free Toboggan Run

Two Hills, Two Completely Different Kinds of “Sledding”

Ask a Berlin family where to go sledding and you’ll hear both names in the same breath: Teufelsberg in the west, Kienberg in the east. They get treated as a matching pair, but the actual experience at each one has almost nothing in common. Teufelsberg is old-fashioned, weather-dependent sledding on a real forest hill, free, unmanaged, and entirely dependent on whether snow has actually fallen and stuck. Kienberg’s headline winter attraction, the Natur-Bobbahn, is a permanent, ticketed, rail-based toboggan track that runs on its own wheeled sleds independent of snow for most of the year. Neither of the general directories that catalogue Berlin’s dozens of natural sledding hills lists Kienberg among them, which is the clearest signal that these are genuinely different activities wearing the same word.

Teufelsberg: Berlin’s Classic, Genuinely Wild Sledding Hill

Teufelsberg isn’t a real geological hill at all. It’s an artificial mound in the Grunewald forest built from roughly 12 million cubic meters of rubble bulldozed from bombed-out Berlin, dumped here between 1950 and 1972 over the top of an unfinished Nazi military-technical college designed by Albert Speer that proved too sturdy to demolish outright. That history put a former Allied listening station, part of the NSA-linked ECHELON network, on the summit during the Cold War, and its radomes and observation tower are still the hill’s defining silhouette.

At 120.1 meters above sea level, Teufelsberg was long marketed as Berlin’s highest point, and it’s still routinely called that today. It technically isn’t: since January 2015 the Arkenberge, a similar rubble hill in Pankow, has stood about 1.8 meters taller. The Arkenberge aren’t developed for recreation the way Teufelsberg is, so this is a footnote rather than a reason to go elsewhere, but it’s worth knowing before repeating the “highest hill in Berlin” line as fact.

The sledding run itself sits at the foot of the listening station, runs roughly 100 to 400 meters depending on which line you take, and is described consistently as wide with a gentle-to-moderate overall gradient, which is part of why it’s often called the fastest sledding hill in the city. Reaching the top takes about a 15-minute walk from the parking area. There’s no official minimum age posted, and family directories tag it broadly (ages 4 to 16 in some listings), but the hill suits confident, sure-footed kids better than very young toddlers: it’s a genuine forest slope with trees at the edges, not a small groomed municipal mound, and the climb up is real exercise in itself.

What the February 2021 Accidents Actually Show About Safety Here

Because Teufelsberg is real, unmanaged terrain, it’s worth being specific about what can go wrong rather than either avoiding the hill or assuming it’s risk-free. On a Sunday afternoon in February 2021, a woman and a girl were seriously injured in two separate sledding accidents within the same afternoon, both on the run at the foot of the listening station. Reporters on the scene described the paths and sledding tracks as partly heavily iced, the predictable result of hundreds of people packing the same snow down on a busy day, and the exact sequence of events in each accident was never fully established. What is documented is the rescue response: an ADAC helicopter was called but couldn’t land, and the fire brigade had real difficulty reaching the accident site with vehicles because of the remote, wooded terrain. This wasn’t a one-off scare, either: two adjacent slopes on the hill were closed outright back in the 1970s after fatal accidents made them too dangerous to keep open.

None of that means Teufelsberg should be avoided. Hundreds of people sled here safely on a typical snowy day, and it remains the default choice for a huge share of Berlin families. It does mean treating icy patches seriously (they build up fastest on the most popular, most heavily used lines), keeping clear of the tree lines at the slope’s edges, watching younger kids closely on the steeper upper sections, and not assuming a rescue vehicle could reach you as fast here as it would at a small park hill in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

Photo by ozlem on Pexels

Getting to Teufelsberg

Teufelsberg sits inside the Grunewald forest, off Teufelsseechaussee in Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Drivers can use the parking areas along Teufelsseechaussee itself and then walk roughly 15 minutes up through the forest to the sledding run. Without a car, the closest S-Bahn station is Grunewald (S7), about a 25-minute walk through the woods, or you can take the S3 or S9 to Heerstraße instead; bus lines 186, M19, and M49 also stop within reach of the hill. There’s no ticket or booking needed for any of this, since sledding on the hill itself is free and unrestricted.

Kienberg’s Natur-Bobbahn: A Toboggan Run That Doesn’t Need Snow

Kienberg, a 102-meter rise in the Wuhle valley in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, sits inside Kienbergpark, a 60-hectare public green space built for Berlin’s hosting of the 2017 International Garden Exhibition (IGA). The park itself is free and unrestricted to enter, year-round, with six entrance points. What requires payment are the two attractions built for the IGA: the neighboring, ticketed Gärten der Welt theme gardens, and the Seilbahn cable car that links the park’s valley station to the Gärten der Welt mountain station via a middle stop at the Wolkenhain, an approximately 20-meter observation platform at the summit with sightlines up to 50km on a clear day. The Seilbahn only runs from April through September, so it’s not an option in winter regardless of snow.

The actual winter-associated attraction here is the Natur-Bobbahn, Berlin’s only permanent nature toboggan run, built on the north slope of the Kienberg right next to the Wolkenhain cable car station. It’s a fixed rail track, not a snow-dependent slope: riders take the park’s own wheeled sleds down roughly 500 meters of curving track, reaching speeds up to 40 km/h, regardless of whether it’s snowed. The run was destroyed in an arson attack on the night of June 29-30, 2022, and reopened on July 11, 2024, after a 1.8 million euro rebuild by operator Leitner Seilbahn Berlin GmbH that added a second curve, a rope-lift return system to replace the old chain drive, and an automatic distance-control system that brakes sleds to prevent collisions.

The track isn’t open every single day of the year. It has typically closed for a stretch of January (a “Winterpause”), then reopened at reduced hours for Berlin’s winter school holidays in early February, before returning to fuller seasonal hours. Because these windows shift year to year, confirm the current schedule before a special trip rather than assuming last year’s dates.

Getting to Kienbergpark

The park’s address is Hellersdorfer Straße 151, 12619 Berlin, and the nearest U-Bahn stop is the barrier-free U5 station Kienberg - Gärten der Welt, right at the park entrance. Bus line 197 also stops at Hellersdorfer Str./Gärten der Welt. Parking near the entrance is limited, so public transit is the more reliable option. Entering Kienbergpark itself costs nothing; you only pay if you ride the Natur-Bobbahn, enter the separately gated Gärten der Welt, or take the Seilbahn.

Why You Can’t Count on Snow in Berlin

Both hills sit inside the same climate reality, which is worth stating plainly rather than assuming: Berlin’s snow has become genuinely unreliable, and this is exactly why Kienberg’s snow-independent Bobbahn functions as such a useful fallback. Henning Rust, a meteorologist at Freie Universität Berlin, points to a historical average of roughly 40 snow days a year in the city up to the mid-20th century, a figure that has since fallen to around 15 a year, with some recent winters logging only 3 to 4 snow days and at least one logging none at all. None of this means Teufelsberg never gets good sledding conditions, it did as recently as recent winters, but it does mean a trip built entirely around “we’ll go sledding at Teufelsberg this weekend” needs a backup plan (or a trip to Kienberg’s Bobbahn instead) rather than an assumption that snow will cooperate.

Step by Step

1. Check the actual snow report before heading to Teufelsberg, not just whether it’s cold; a few centimeters that melted overnight won’t give you a usable run, and Berlin’s snow days have roughly halved over the past several decades.
2. If snow does lie at Teufelsberg, expect real forest terrain: dress for a genuine 15-minute uphill walk, watch for icy patches on heavily used lines, and keep an eye on younger kids on the steeper sections near the top.
3. Don’t assume Kienberg means snow sledding. Its Natur-Bobbahn is a paid, rail-based ride that runs on its own schedule independent of snow, not a snow hill; check current hours since it has a January closure window.
4. For the Bobbahn, confirm your child clears the 1.35m solo-ride threshold (minimum age 8) before assuming they’ll ride unaccompanied; younger or shorter kids need a companion in the sled.
5. Kienbergpark itself is free; you only need to budget separately for the Bobbahn, the Gärten der Welt gardens, or the Seilbahn (April-September only), none of which are required just to visit the park.
6. Have a non-snow backup for both spots: Teufelsberg’s hiking trails and viewpoint work year-round, and the former listening station runs its own paid tours regardless of season.

Compliance Note

This page reflects publicly available information about Teufelsberg and Kienbergpark current as of mid-2026, including official park and operator sources for the Natur-Bobbahn, press coverage of the February 2021 Teufelsberg sledding accidents, meteorological data on Berlin snow days, and general family-travel directories for Berlin sledding hills. Prices, opening hours, and seasonal closure dates for the Natur-Bobbahn and the Seilbahn change from year to year; confirm current details directly with the operators before planning a visit, and never assume snow conditions without checking a live forecast first.