Speicherstadt

District Hamburg, Germany

The Speicherstadt (lit. "city of warehouses") is a complex of 17 warehouses - now mostly in disuse, although not totally, located along the canals of the center and near the port of the German city of Hamburg: built between 1884 and 1888 on an area of approx. A total of 330,000 m2 and designed by the Hamburg engineer Franz Andreas Meyer, they represented, at the time, the largest warehouse complex ever built in the world.

The history of the Speicherstadt, which constitutes one of the main attractions of the city of Hamburg and has been a protected monument since 1991, is illustrated in the Speicherstadtmuseum which in Italian could be translated as: Museum of the city of warehouses. On July 5, 2015, it was officially named a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The warehouses, seven to eight floors high, supported by foundation stilts in oak wood, with the superstructure of red brick (according to the typical architecture of the Hanseatic cities) and embellished with turrets and pinnacles, were used for the storage of goods of various genre, such as coffee, tea, spices, cocoa, tobacco, rum, oriental carpets, etc.