Gelsenkirchen Audio Tours

Gelsenkirchen was, for the better part of a century, one of the most intensively mined cities in Europe. At the peak of the Ruhr coalfields in the 1950s, the ground beneath the city was riddled with workings to depths of over a kilometer. The coal is gone now, and the city has spent the past four decades figuring out what to do with the landscape that industry left behind. The answer it has arrived at is unexpected: solar power. Gelsenkirchen hosts the largest solar installation on a building facade in Germany, mounted on the old Nordsternturm tower at the Nordsternpark industrial heritage site, and the region has become a serious hub for renewable energy research.

The Nordsternpark itself, built on the site of the former Nordstern colliery, is part of the Emscher Park project that transformed industrial ruins across the Ruhr into public green spaces in the 1990s.

The winding towers, conveyor structures, and old pit head buildings have been preserved as monuments to a working culture that shaped this part of Germany as profoundly as any castle or cathedral. Walking through them, especially at the Zeche Nordstern, you understand something about the people who built Gelsenkirchen that the museums alone cannot convey.