Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex
Zeche Zollverein
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The 7.2-tonne coal cube on display measures 1.6 m along each edge and is described as the largest single block of coal ever cut.
- In 1953 Zollverein raised 2.4 million tonnes of coal, more than any other mine in Germany that year.
- By 1937 the colliery employed about 6,900 people and produced some 3.6 million tonnes of coal a year.
- Shaft 12 and the older Shaft 2 reached roughly 1,000 metres underground, making Zollverein one of Germany's deepest collieries.
- Shaft 12 pulled together the output of four older mining areas with eleven shafts into a single central plant.
- Its double-trestle winding tower became the model for a whole generation of later central mine installations in Germany.
- At its height the coking plant ran 304 ovens, turning about 10,000 tonnes of coal into 8,600 tonnes of coke every day.
- The coking plant alone employed around 1,000 workers when it opened in 1961.
- Zollverein was the last working colliery in Essen, a city that once had hundreds of mines.
- In 2010, when Essen and the Ruhr were European Capital of Culture, around 2.2 million people visited the site.
Why it is worth it
Zollverein is often called the most beautiful coal mine in the world, and the phrase is less of a joke than it sounds. Its Shaft 12, opened in 1932 and designed by Fritz Schupp and Martin Kremmer, treated a colliery as a piece of modern architecture: plain cubic buildings of steel trusses and reinforced concrete, with a double-trestle winding tower over the shaft. That tower became the emblem of German heavy industry and later of the Ruhr's reinvention, and it is the image most people bring home from Essen.
The mine itself goes back to 1847, when the Duisburg industrialist Franz Haniel, needing coke for steel, sank the first shaft and named the company after the German customs union. By 1890 it was the most productive mine in Germany. Shaft 12 was built as a central facility that could handle the output of the older shafts together, up to 12,000 tonnes a day. In 1961 a vast coking plant with 192 ovens, also designed by Schupp, opened alongside; at its peak it was among the most productive in the world. Mining ended on 23 December 1986 and the coke ovens went cold on 30 June 1993. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia bought the site immediately and protected it, and in 2001 UNESCO inscribed the colliery and coking plant together.
Today the site is a place to wander as much as a museum. The former coal washery, the largest building, houses the visitor centre and the Ruhr Museum, the regional museum of the Ruhr, whose permanent exhibition runs from the formation of coal 300 million years ago to the present. You enter it by a pair of free-standing escalators, each about 58 m long, conceived by OMA, which carry visitors up to the visitor centre 24 m above the ground. The coking plant, with its long batteries of ovens and pipework, can be explored separately, and in the former mixing hall sits a single block of coal weighing 7.2 tonnes, cut in 2016 from a seam more than 1,100 m underground. Shaft 12 itself cannot be descended: it is now part of the system that drains mine water from the central Ruhr and has been backfilled with concrete.
Zollverein is also an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage.
Getting there
The complex is in the north of Essen, about 4 km from the city centre. From Essen Hauptbahnhof, tram line 107 runs to the Zollverein stop, about 500 m from the visitor centre in the coal washery. The nearest airport is Düsseldorf (DUS), about 29 km away, with frequent trains to Essen.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord 18.4 km · blast-furnace
- Zollern II/IV Colliery 20.5 km · industrial-heritage-site
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Zollverein Coal Mine Industrial Complex is a large former industrial site in the city of Essen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The first coal mine on the premises was founded in 1847, and mining activities took place from 1851 until 23 December 1986. For decades, starting in the late 1950s, the two parts of the site, Zollverein Coal Mine and Zollverein Coking Plant, ranked among the largest of their kinds in Europe. Shaft 12, built in the New Objectivity style, was opened in 1932 and is considered an architectural and technical masterpiece, earning it a reputation as the "most beautiful coal mine in the world".
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