In the middle of Hamburg lies one of Germany's most unexpected and most popular sights. A place where the whole world comes to life in miniature format. Welcome to Miniatur Wunderland - Where childhood fantasies are combined with engineering and create something very unique!
What is Miniatur Wunderland?
Miniatur Wunderland is a place that is difficult to understand the allure of until you have been here. An entire harbor warehouse filled with miniature railways and motorways might not sound that exciting on paper, but this is something else entirely. This is an interactive and living world, meticulously controlled from a control room. Add to that also hundreds of buttons that visitors can press and you have a world where anything can happen. Cars Drive on the highways, cars crash, police cars come, traffic lights change. Airplanes land, taxi in, take off and queue. What happens in the world is not static, different days offer different events.
16 million visitors can't be wrong
Miniatur wunderland was started in 2000 by three men with a dream and a vision to create the world's longest miniature railway. 1,2 million man hours and 45 million Euro later this is voted Germany's most popular attraction and attracts visitors from all over the world. A total of 16 million visitors have discovered the magic of miniature land over the years – an impressive figure for any museum.
Visiting Miniatur Wunderland is a bit like viewing a fairy tale from above. 300 "wonderlands" live here, figures that are all unique and all tell a story. It is as if you have stopped time and captured a moment of their artificial life. The aunt chasing the thief with a rolling pin, the girl feeding a dog, the slightly overrefreshed man with the lederhosen at the beer festival and the women picking lavender in the fields. There is a lot of humor in all the characters and a lot of the forbidden for children.
There are many Easter eggs and it is a bit of a sport to find them. Here you can find giggling minions, Yoda peering into a cave or Trump being sent into space sitting on top of a space rocket. Those who build the worlds must have a very fun job.
16 kilometers of train tracks are always in operation and 1000 trains run around the different landscapes. Here, with a few steps, you can travel from Germany to Italy, or from Patagonia to Monaco. But it's not just the trains that move, there are cars, hot air balloons, airplanes and space rockets here. Press a button and the fire department comes full speed to put out a fire in a house. Press another button and a giant thunderstorm will occur. It moves and flashes everywhere.
Every 15-20 minutes it changes between "day" and "night". Some buttons can only be pressed during either day or night, so you often have to stay a little at each country and look a little extra when it changes.
My absolute favorite is the large airport Knuffingen airport, an absolutely unparalleled area with planes landing, taxiing in, picking up/dropping off luggage, taxiing out and taking off. Here you can stand for a long time and look at all the details and all the flashing lights, a smorgasbord of exciting details for travel geeks.
How do I visit Miniature Wonderland?
There is really only one piece of advice – book tickets online and book them well in advance! During school holidays and holiday periods, there is often more than a 2-hour waiting time to get in if you haven't booked a ticket - and this despite the fact that in high season they are open from early morning to midnight. We visited Miniatur Wunderland during an off-season weekend at the beginning of March, but if I hadn't booked tickets well in advance, we wouldn't have gotten tickets.
The tickets are linked to a time and you can arrive up to 15 minutes late without losing your seat. We arrived earlier than booked and were able to enter earlier. Keep in mind that Miniatur Wunderland is located inside Hamburg, so you need to expect traffic queues to enter Hamburg.
Expect a visit to take at least two hours. Some stay for four hours and others for 30 minutes, but all stay longer than they thought. There are so many details to look at and there is so much going on all the time, that it is hard to get carried away.
We stayed for 2,5 hours and also had time to eat lunch at the local cafe, but then we very quickly went through the last areas. A tip is to take a coffee break in the middle of the visit, as you can easily get an overdose of the wealth of detail.
There are 44 parking spaces right outside on the street, but it is almost always full. The alternative is a parking garage located a few hundred meters away - another reason why you need to be outside well in advance of your entrance time.
Dogs are welcome inside, but they need to be able to feel safe around a lot of noise, light and people. We carried Lilibet around and she even sometimes fell asleep in our arms, but if you have a bigger dog, it needs to like a lot of people.
Read more on the official website https://www.miniatur-wunderland.com/
