Kleiner Kiel is a shallow brackish inlet sitting at the heart of Kiel, a remnant of the estuary that once connected the city to the fjord. Today it forms the green spine of the city centre, flanked by parks, the town hall, and the opera house.

The water has always shaped what happens around it. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who spent summers sailing with royal cousins off the coast of England, chose Kiel as the home of his Imperial German Navy and later launched Kiel Week here, a sailing regatta designed as much to impress those same cousins as to race against them.

At its peak, the shipyard across the harbour employed 80,000 men. Then, in 1918, it was the sailors themselves who brought the whole enterprise down, refusing orders for a suicidal final battle and sparking the German Revolution that ended the First World War and toppled the Kaiser.

VoiceMap's self-guided audio tours follow the water's edge around the Kleiner Kiel, tracing the rise of the Imperial Navy, the sailors' mutiny of 1918, and the Nobel Prize winners the city produced along the way.