The Most Remarkable Miniature Parks in the World
5 places in 5 countries ยท updated 5 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable miniature parks in the world are Holyland Model of Jerusalem (Israel), Madurodam (Kingdom of the Netherlands) and Miniatur Wunderland (Germany). The list covers 5 miniature parks in 5 countries. Germany has the most, with 1. Last updated 5 October 2026.
A miniature park shrinks the world so that it can be taken in at a glance. Buildings, streets, railways and harbours are rebuilt at a fixed scale, with enough detail that the eye stops noticing the size and starts reading the scene. The finest ones are works of patience and research: models built from historical sources, landscapes with working trains and ships, whole towns arranged so that walking through them feels like flying low over a real place.
The Holyland Model of Jerusalem, now at the Israel Museum, reconstructs the city as it was in the late Second Temple period, at a scale of 1:50. Bekonscot in Buckinghamshire, opened in 1929, is a model village of the English countryside crossed by a garden railway. Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg's Speicherstadt is a vast indoor model railway with landscapes from many countries. Madurodam in The Hague gathers Dutch landmarks at 1:25 and is named after George Maduro, a Dutch resistance fighter, and Tobu World Square in Japan brings famous buildings from around the world together on one site.
These parks are selected by how they look and ordered by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph with its author named and a place on the map, and the section can be browsed country by country on separate pages.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Holyland Model of Jerusalem | Miniature park | Israel | |
| 2 | Madurodam | Miniature park | Kingdom of the Netherlands | |
| 3 | Miniatur Wunderland | Miniature park | Germany | |
| 4 | Bekonscot | Miniature park | United Kingdom | |
| 5 | Tobu World Square | Miniature park | Japan |
01 Holyland Model of Jerusalem
Israel ยท 0.7 km from Jerusalem31.773ยฐ N 35.202ยฐ E
Image by reijotelaranta from Pixabay Laid out on the open ground of the Israel Museum, this is Jerusalem as the historian Flavius Josephus described it: the city of the year 66 CE, four years before the Roman destruction of the Temple, reconstructed in stone at a scale of 1:50 over some 2,000 square metres. The historian and geographer Michael Avi-Yonah designed it from Josephus, other ancient texts and what archaeology then knew. It was built in 1962โ1966 on the grounds of the Holyland Hotel, commissioned by the hotel's owner Hans Kroch in memory of his son Yaakov, who was killed in 1948.
Did you know? The model is built from the real materials of the ancient city: Jerusalem limestone, marble for the Temple and Herod's palace, gold, copper, bronze, iron and wood.
02 Madurodam
Kingdom of the Netherlands ยท 2.9 km from The Hague52.099ยฐ N 4.298ยฐ E
Cqui ยท CC BY-SA 2.5 Madurodam is a whole country shrunk to a scale of 1:25. In the Scheveningen district of The Hague, the park gathers miniature versions of the Netherlands' famous buildings and landscapes โ landmarks, historic city centres and great works of engineering โ and sets them in a single small city with its own trains, ships and tiny inhabitants. Everything is modelled to scale, down to the trees and street furniture, and the little figures change their clothes with the seasons.
Did you know? About four kilometres of miniature railway wind through the park, and its trains cover roughly 15,000 kilometres a year.
03 Miniatur Wunderland
Germany ยท 1.1 km from Hamburg53.544ยฐ N 9.989ยฐ E
Image by McRonny from Pixabay Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg is, according to Guinness World Records, the largest model railway in the world, and it is much more than a train set. Laid out on the upper floors of a warehouse in the historic Speicherstadt, it fills well over a thousand square metres with miniature landscapes in H0 scale, around 16 km of track, some 1,230 digitally controlled trains, thousands of houses and bridges, hundreds of cars that drive by themselves, and about 290,000 tiny figures. A recurring cycle fades the light from day to night, and nearly half a million LEDs switch on in windows, streetlamps and runways.
Did you know? Scaled up to real size, the track in the layout would stretch for about 1,367 kilometres.
04 Bekonscot
United Kingdom ยท 33.5 km from Luton51.614ยฐ N 0.645ยฐ W
Image by stgeorgemr from Pixabay Bekonscot is a whole miniature England frozen somewhere around the 1930s, laid out in a garden in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire. It opened to the public in 1929 and claims the title of the oldest original model village in the world. Everything is built to one inch to the foot, so an adult walks among church spires and thatched roofs at knee height, looking down into gardens, market squares and railway cuttings as if from a low-flying aircraft.
Did you know? Guinness World Records recognises Bekonscot as the oldest continuously operating miniature world, dating its opening to 9 August 1929.
05 Tobu World Square
Japan ยท 31.9 km from Utsunomiya36.808ยฐ N 139.712ยฐ E
Jiang Dong-Qin ยท Public domain Tobu World Square is a miniature park in the Kinugawa Onsen hot-spring district of Nikkล, and it takes its craft unusually seriously. Opened in 1993 by the Tobu railway group, it reproduces 102 buildings from 21 countries at a uniform scale of 1:25, set among landscaped gardens and populated by around 140,000 tiny figures. Many of the models depict UNESCO World Heritage sites, and because everything shares one scale, the relative size of the world's great buildings becomes suddenly legible in a way no photograph manages.
Did you know? The park still shows the original twin towers of New York's World Trade Center, destroyed in 2001, in a model almost 20 metres tall.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented โ the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the oldest model village in the world?
- Bekonscot in Beaconsfield, England, opened in 1929 and is often described as the oldest original model village in the world.
- What is the most remarkable miniature park in the world?
- On our list, Holyland Model of Jerusalem (Israel) ranks first, followed by Madurodam (Kingdom of the Netherlands) and Miniatur Wunderland (Germany).
- Who is Madurodam named after?
- Madurodam in The Hague is named after George Maduro, a Dutch law student and resistance fighter who died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1945; his parents funded the park in his memory.
- Which country has the most miniature parks?
- In our collection, the most come from Germany (1), Israel (1) and Japan (1).
- How many miniature parks are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 5 miniature parks in 5 countries. Germany has the most, with 1.