As a link between the historic city centre and HafenCity on the Elbe, the stone buildings of Hamburg’s Speicherstadt are famous worldwide. Spread over a total area of 26 hectares is the world’s largest complex of warehouses, which were built on thousands of oak piles from 1883 onwards. The warehouses were used for duty-free storage of goods in the port metropolis at the end of the 19th century, and most of them are still actively used as commercial buildings today. In the course of the Second World War, about half of the warehouses were destroyed. The Speicherstadt has been a listed building since 1991 and has even been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2015.
