AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Planetenlehrpfad in Bad Laasphe is a walking trail that turns the entire solar system into something you can cover on foot. Laid out across roughly 6 km through the Lahn and Banfe valleys, it is a working scale model of the Sun and its planets built to a ratio of 1 to 1 billion, so the planets and the empty distances between them finally make intuitive sense.↗↗
The walk begins at the model of the Sun — an unmistakable yellow concrete sphere, 1.40 m across, set in the Lahn riverside meadows near the Amalienhütte in Niederlaasphe — and ends some 5.97 km away at the dwarf planet Pluto near Laaspherhütte. Mercury sits a mere 58 m from the Sun, Earth 150 m, Jupiter 778 m, and Saturn a strung-out 1.43 km on, with each planet rendered at its true relative size.↗↗↗
Conceived in 1998 by pupils and teachers of the Städtisches Gymnasium Bad Laasphe to mark the school's 75th anniversary, and backed by local businesses and the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, the trail is gentle, paved and open to all — families, strollers and wheelchairs alike. It is as much an educational experience as a stroll, and at a normal walking pace you cross the solar system three to four times faster than light itself.
