Tropical Island Resort is a large artificial “exotic island” resort in Germany. The 107m tall building was designed and built as a hangar for CL160 Super Heavy-Lift Cargo Airships, but the airships were never constructed so the hangar was a bit useless.

A Malaysian company later bought the hangar and added artificial sunlight, palm trees, sand, swimming pools and bird noises to create the illusion of paradise. The resort is open 24hours all year round and perhaps as a homage to the building’s intended use there is a small blimp parked on the runway outside.

But all we really care about is the records – the dome is one of the largest buildings on Earth by volume but its true record is the world’s largest single hall without supporting pillars inside. Wooooo.

Thanks: Pille

This is the Urban Stadium in Nuremberg…

Erm, no. It used to be the Urban Stadium, it now appears to be the Frankenstadion…

Sorry. This stadium has been renamed the easyCredit-Stadion for the next 5 years. Except… FIFA have renamed it the FIFA WM-Stadion Nürnberg for the duration of the 2006 World Cup.

Well whatever it’s called, this is the location of tonight’s match between England and Trinidad and Tobago, which despite the odds is promising to be a very interesting match!

More about, er, the stadium in this post at Wikipedia

At a naval base in La Spezia, Italy, we see the world famous tall ship “Amerigo Vespucci”. She was ordered in 1925 along with the Cristoforo Colombo, an identical ship that was decommissioned by the USSR after WWII, and is modelled on 18th century cannon ships.

However the Amerigo Vespucci has no cannons, which is a shame as I think cannons would have made the Cutty Sark Tall Ships’ Race – which she often competes in – a much more exciting affair.

The Naval Base is worth browsing as there’s various submarines and other ships in dry-dock kicking around. Wikipedia Link.

Thanks: Thomas Blüthgen

Yesterday, at their Geo Developer Day, Google released Google Earth 4.0 (Beta) – a major update to the mapping application which features 3D textured models and a new interface, as well as Linux support and a universal mac binary!

To coincide with the release we’ve improved our Google Earth links on Google Sightseeing posts by adding an excerpt from the post in the balloons that pop up. We’ve also much improved our Network Link (which shows all Google Sightseeing posts across the globe) by grouping posts into folders and adding an automatic refresh. If you’ve previously loaded the network link into Google Earth then we’d suggest removing it and adding the new link instead.

Feedback is welcome, just add a comment below. We’ll have some new sights for you later today!

Google Earth Blog reports that Google Earth has had a huge imagery update with satellite and aerial pics across the globe.

The images haven’t made their way into Maps yet, so if you click the image below you’ll just get an out-of-focus empty shore, but click the Google Earth link and you’ll fly to one of the super-cool artificial Palm Islands in Dubai.

There’s loads of things to see all over the place so hopefully we’ll see the images in Google Maps soon!