Qualla: Tropical Islands Resort

Tropical Islands Resort: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Immanuel Giel assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The building was raised for an airship that was never built. On flat sandy ground fifty kilometres south of Berlin, CargoLifter AG spent €78 million on a hall 360 metres long, 210 metres wide and 107 metres high, with not one supporting pillar inside it — 5.5 million cubic metres of enclosed air, the largest free-standing hall in the world and the fourth-largest building anywhere by usable volume. It was commissioned in November 2000 and named the Aerium. The CL160 heavy-lift airship it was designed to house never got off the drawing board. CargoLifter went bankrupt in mid-2002, and the state of Brandenburg was left holding the biggest empty room on Earth.

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Immanuel Giel assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tropical Islands Resort: Luftwaffe, Red Army, Airship Company

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Kühn, CC BY-SA 3.0. The site had already outlived three sets of ambitions. The Luftwaffe began developing Brand-Briesen Airfield in 1938. The Red Army took it in May 1945 and then stayed, adding a second runway and hardened, nuclear-resistant command and control facilities for a fighter regiment — a...

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Image: Stefan Kühn | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tropical Islands Resort: Twenty-Six Degrees, Every Day of the Year

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tropical Islands Resort, CC BY-SA 3.0. In June 2003 the Malaysian corporation Tanjong bought the hall for €17.5 million, €10 million of which came as a subsidy from Brandenburg. The building permit arrived on 2 February 2004, and Tropical Islands opened on 19 December 2004 — mid-December, in Brandenburg, which was ver...

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Image: Tropical Islands Resort | CC BY-SA 3.0

Tropical Islands Resort: The Plants Couldn't See

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The rainforest was the part nobody had modelled properly. Around 50,000 plants of some 600 species went in beneath a steel roof that turned out to block most of the light they needed. Photosynthesis stalled and the palms sulked. The fix, installed in October 2005, was a 20,000-s...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Tropical Islands Resort: Slow Start in the Pines

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ηeonZERO, Public domain. Commercially, the early years were bleak. The resort needs roughly 1.25 million visitors a year to operate cost-effectively; in 2005 it lost somewhere between €10 million and €20 million, and by October 2006 had drawn about 600,000 people. The diagnosis was largely geographic. Tr...

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Image: ηeonZERO | Public domain