The World Map at Lake Klejtrup

The World Map on the banks of the Lake Klejtrup in Denmark is a 4,000-square-meter walkable map of the world built out of soil, stones and grass. It’s the work of only one man — Søren Poulsen, who spent the last 25 years of his life building it.

Søren Poulsen, the creator of "The World Map", was born in Denmark in 1888. Having spent part of his life in America, he returned to the village where he was born by the lake in Klejtrup. In 1943, Søren Poulsen was working on the drainage of the surrounding meadows when he found a stone shaped like Jutland, inspiring him to create a small world of his own. The following year, with the help of primitive tools and a wheelbarrow, Poulsen started laying big stones on the ice on the lake, and slowly the World Map took shape.

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Photo credit: Frank Vincentz/Wikimedia

Søren Poulsen continued building his map until his death in 1969. The final map measures 45 meters by 90 meters, and was built entirely to scale —one 111-kilometer degrees of latitude corresponds to 27 centimeters on the map. Today, the Verdenskortet ved Klejtrup Sø (Danish for “World Map at Lake Klejtrup”) is a popular attraction in the Viborg area.

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