So small and yet so grand

It's not the world-famous Oktoberfest or Neuschwanstein Castle: Germany's most popular tourist attraction is Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg. At least that's what the German Center for Tourism found in a 2017 survey. More than a million people visited the intricate model train exhibition in 2018. According to Wunderland (which translates to Wonderland), roughly 25% of visitors hail from abroad.

The Wonderland holds the record for the world's longest model railway: roughly 16 kilometers (10 miles). And if the trains here were the size of actual trains, the train tracks would measure over 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) — also the world record.

Wunderland was founded by German twin brothers Frederik (l) and Gerrit Braun. The exhibit first opened in August 2001. It broke the record for the world's longest model railway for the first time in 2015. The brothers have been obsessed with trying to break world records since they were little — they say they also own the largest collection of German Mickey Mouse magazines.

Miniatur Wunderland can be found in Hamburg in northern Germany. It's located in the famous historic warehouse district, right across from the harbor. And here's what the Wunderland version of that neighborhood looks like.

Miniatur Wunderland is more than just a model railway exhibition — it's a tiny, intricately built world. There are 1,040 trains with more than 10,000 wagons. The longest train measures close to 15 meters (50 ft). There are also 263,000 tiny figures, more than 9,000 cars, 52 airplanes, 130,000 trees and 30,000 liters (8,000 gallons) of water that form lakes, rivers and the like.

"We wanted to build a world that inspires women, men and children alike to dream and marvel," Wunderland-founder Gerrit Braun once said. The tiny world they have built offers millions of small details to be discovered — not just technical feats, but also lovingly built scenes, some realistic, others surreal, some tragic, but many funny. Like this rather intimate one.

Wunderland says that it employs 360 people. Thus far, according to the company, 923,000 hours of work and € 5 million ($ 38 million) have gone into building the 1,500- square-meter (160,000-square-foot) miniature universe.

Wunderland also holds another record: In 2016, it became the smallest site in the world to be tracked on Google Street View. A miniature Google car went to work in the Wunderland world.

"If it's up to us, we'll never stop building," the Braun brothers recently told the Hamburg daily MoPo. They are planning a massive expansion. They have rented space in a building across the canal from their current location. The plan: to build a 25-meter-long (82-foot-long) bridge to connect the current location and the new location by late 2020.

At present, Wunderland trains travel mostly through European landscapes and cities — like Germany's mountains, Norwegian coastlines, or Venice (pictured). The only exception: A small area is dedicated to the US. But this is about to change. The Wunderland team is working on a South American section. By 2021, they want to have a miniature Rio de Janeiro and rainforests on display.

A team in a suburb of Buenos Aires is currently working on the new additions. That team includes local Ricardo Martinez and his family. The passionate model builder and Wunderland superfan first learned about the Hamburg exhibition through a feature broadcast on DW in 2002. So despite the naysayers, journalism can actually help change the world ... at least at this miniature scale.