Gelsenkirchen: City of a thousand fires and home of Schalke

May 16, 2006, 12:32 GMT

Gelsenkirchen - The impressive Arena AufSchalke stadium in Gelsenkirchen, once a centre of Germany`s coalmining industry, will host four group games as well as a World Cup quarter-final.

The high-tech home of Bundesliga club Schalke 04 is one of the best in Europe and has a retractable roof, removable playing surface and can house over 60,000 football fans. It even hosted a biathlon skiing race in 2002.

With 6.4 million people living within a 50 kilometre radius of the stadium, and an incredible 60 million within 250 kilometres, it isn`t surprising that Schalke are one of Germany`s best supported clubs.

The fans of the legendary football club have the nickname of 'Knappen', earned as a result of the hard work under the earth with which they made a living.

This is a reference to the drills with which they split rocks in search of the valuable soft coal until Sunday finally arrived, the sacred day dedicated to the club with the royal blue and white strip and to the grilled sausages, dusted with curry powder, on a mountain of French fries, washed down with an abundance of the typical pils- type beer.

In the 1950s almost a half million miners extracted annually no less than 124,600 tons of soft coal in the region. But the boom in 'black gold' was over with cheaper hard coal coming in from abroad.

These imports contributed to the death of the powerful mining industry which had turned Gelsenkirchen from a small settlement in 1150 to a mighty city which stayed on the crest of a wave, thanks to the demand for energy in the industrial revolution in the 19th century.

Thousands of people became unemployed and disorientated. But this has changed in the last years in the city with more than 300,000 inhabitants who called their city the 'city of a thousand fires', because of its countless furnaces.

Today it could be called the 'city of a thousand suns'. After the golden era of coal, Gelsenkirchen placed its bets in time, becoming a centre of production and research into solar energy.

Group games:

June 9: Poland v Ecuador 
June 12: United States v Czech Republic
June 16: Argentina v Serbia and Montenegro
June 21: Portugal v Mexico
Quarter-final: July 1: W51 v W52