lethargic_man: (Berlin)
Lethargic Man (anag.) ([personal profile] lethargic_man) wrote2021-04-29 09:34 pm

Not just a solar farm

I didn't realise what I was looking at on this bike ride until I'd already got home again:

[solar farm]

I thought it was just a solar farm, but see the concrete ground in the foreground? Let's take a look from above, courtesy of Google:

[satellite view of solar farm]

See the runways now? (My photo was taken from the bottom left of the aerial view.) This was Staaken Airfield once; it's been closed now for almost seventy years. In the 1920s, zeppelins were built here:

[sculpture]
The Graf Zeppelin at Staaken Airfield in 1928, from Wikipedia (Creative Commons licenced)

This is just one of quite a few disused airports and airfields around Berlin, but this is probably the least readily identifiable today. Others include include Tempelhof Airport, which you might know through its appearance (actually a lookalike building) in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which was once the world's largest building, where you can now go skateboarding along the runways, and where some of the grass between the taxiways has been turned into a birdlife sanctuary; Gatow Airport, which was once an RAF base; and the recently shut Tegel, which was named after German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, on whom see my next post (once I've got around to translating an infoboard).


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