7. March 2025
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Museums & Exhibitions

Monaco & Provence at Miniatur Wunderland

Florian Buechtingby Florian Buechting

I simply love the Miniatur Wunderland. You can hardly challenge that the scale model landscape and rail attraction is the best one in the world. Their level of detail and sense of humor and irony is amazing. During a visit in December 2024, I visited some of the parts of the exhibition, which I haven’t seen before. Thereby, I was especially keen on visiting the Monaco section, which is the twelfth region featured in the Hamburg Speicherstadt. A key attraction is a model scale version of the Monaco Formula One Grand Prix. The 70 sqare meter space also features the French Provence. I take you there in my Pictured Story.

 

Miniatur Wunderland – General Information & Review

I already did a review of the Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, Germany’s best rated attraction on Tripadvisor, before. You can find the link below.

Miniatur Wunderland Hamburg

 

Monaco & Provence – The Landscape

Monaco is definitely the key attraction in that new part of Miniatur Wunderland, but the Provence is a beauty in itself. The historic area in the Southeast of France is beautifully modeled by the Northern German enthusiasts. Nonetheless, my focus has been on the small state at the the Mediterranean coast. The scale model feels almost complete and – as you somehow would expect at Miniatur Wunderland – even areas which are rather hidden for visitors are modeled in a lot of detail. The charming characteristic of the model landscape is their level of detail, but also their sense of humor. Many little stories can be explored the more time you spend in this region or others. Similar to other parts in the exhibition, you can also interact by pressing buttons, which typically lead to some movement in the area you are facing.

One of these interactive features is the Museum of Oceanography, which “opens” to the visitor on demand and shows a lot of their famous exhibits. The area showing the wedding of Rainier III and Grace Kelly is held in black and white, which is also a cool feature. Many visitors were also fascinated by the detailed model of the yacht harbor and all the ships being ashore in front of Monaco. Like in the whole Minatur Wunderland, the light periodically changes from day to night, including dusk and dawn. The illuminated city gives a very special atmosphere.

 

Monaco Formula One Grand Prix

However, the key reason why people visit the Monaco landscape is the scale model of the Monaco Grand Prix. It holds are Formula 1 and Formula E races and took a total of 150,000 working hours. The key reason is the enthusiasm and almost crazy love for the detail of the founders of Miniatur Wunderland. They did not want to have a race on tracks. Furthermore, the cars are too small to have model engines. In fact they are just having individual magnetic codes, so-called Halbach Arrays and are pushed by circuit boards underneath the track which are moving the cars by electromagnetism. These boards are so dense and detailed that there was just one company which finally managed to produce it. Furthermore, the races are not deterministic, the drivers do mistakes and they accelerate and brake like real-world race cars. The program code for that has been majorly developed by one of the managers.

Pictures can only barely reflect how amazing this piece of work is. Furthermore, there are yellow flags, tiny screens in the landscape and big screens around with TV-style race coverage and even a winners ceremony at the end of each race. The only clear difference to the real race is that there are also races during nighttime. Miniatur Wunderland has decided that a race just takes a few laps to have a more entertaining experience. Full-distance races would be possible, though. To me, this is one of the most amazing pieces of engineering I have ever seen. This is also reflected by the fact that the whole implementation took about eleven calendar years.

 

Scale Modeling at Flyctory.com

Cars, Trains, Planes and more – here are postings about the world in model size:

 

Top Pick! Museums Germany

Here are all my Museum / Exhibition reviews related to Germany closing with a Top Pick! rating:

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