Speicherstadt

In Wunderland's Speicherstadt, many tourists are sight-seeing, too. The "Wunderland within Wunderland", including a model railway in scale 1:900, is a special highlight.

The Wunderland's Speicherstadt has been created with a technique called “kit bashing”. This means that pieces, such as facades and roofs, are taken from various commercial kits and subsequently are cut, colored and put together to create the new scale model. Even the smallest oriel windows and sills were rebuilt manually. Following the original, one row of Wunderland’s Speicherstadt houses is facing the fleet (the Hamburg word for "canal"), the other one the street with its bumpy cobblestone pavement.

A special attraction is the “model railway inside the model railway”: The 4th floor of one of the storehouses holds the smallest train in the world (scale 1:9,000). It starts running whenever a visitor presses the action button.

Historic background

Towards the end of the 19th century, a new warehouse district called “Speicherstadt” was built on the Brookinsel, south of the Custom's Channel. Before, the quarter had been home to merchants and other Hamburgians, but due to the Hamburg Freihafen (free trade area) which was established in 1888, more storage space close to the harbor was needed.

The large storage buildings, some of them up to seven floors high, form an impressive unity between the canals and the surrounding streets. The facades, constructed from austere red-brown brick stone are softened by Gothic style turrets, gables, oriel windows and sills. The Speicherstadt was bombed in World War II, but damage was fortunately light and could be repaired.

The warehouses served, and still do serve, primarily as storage space for import goods such as tobacco, coffee, cocoa, tea, rum, dried fruits, nuts or spices, as well as for preserves, optical and electronic equipment, raw silk and oriental carpets. The largest carpet storage of the world holds an impressive 120,000 m² of handmade carpets.