What used to be a place of fun and excitement, with more than 600,000 visitors each year enjoying the various indoor and outdoor pools, is now a vandalized urban ruin, full of graffiti and rats.
Blub, the abbreviation for Berliner Luft und Badeparadies (Berlin Air and Bathing Paradise), opened in February 1985 in the Neukölln district of Berlin, quickly gained national attention for being one of the most attractive recreational centers in Germany.
The park was filled with fountains, waterslides (including one 120-meter “Great Slide”), a sauna garden, whirlpool, a water canal, a sauna garden, and it became one of the most beautiful recreational areas in West Berlin.
However, this 35,000 square meters bathing paradise was cursed by its location. It was built just 100 feet from the Teltow Canal, and presumably, a rat infestation led to its closure by the authorities.
The pool area closed in 2005, and the “Al-Andalus” sauna facilities stayed open for a few more years, but in 2012, after the number of visitors started to drop, everything was closed down. Over the next years, there had been several fires, and the last one was in 2016 destroying parts of the buildings which made the place completely inaccessible and unsafe.
Today the site is owned by a German investor group called H-Group and their plan is to demolish the entire place and build over 400 luxury apartments.