September 3, 2024, 6:37 am | Read time: 3 minutes
Many people associate hiking with natural landscapes – but Leipzig’s Neuseenland is quite different. Where lignite was once mined, visitors can now marvel at the unique scenery on hiking tours. Here is how an abandoned place is being rediscovered.
Wide open spaces and desolate dumps, somewhere between a highway and a central landfill site: anyone visiting the Mining Technology Park in Leipzig’s Neuseenland can safely throw out all notions of parklands. Instead, they get a feel for the gigantomania of open-cast lignite mining, which once shaped the region and now gives it a whole new face. Hiking in Leipzig’s Neuseenland is a unique experience.
“The Bavarians have the mountains and the lakes. We Leipzigers create them ourselves,” says Henry May from the Mining Technology Park. The tanned tour guide with strong hands and a soft Saxon dialect could easily be a miner. But he only pretends to be one to make people think about the villages that were dredged up and the people who were resettled. So that the “GDR’s hunger for energy could be satisfied,” as he emphasizes. Now there are 40 square kilometers of green dumps and flooded open-cast mining pits.
Leipzig created its own water-hiking country
Wolfgang Flohr is not the only one who is convinced that Leipzig can create its own water hiking region. Ten years ago, he was looking for a tour that would connect the region’s special features, viewpoints, and attractions and make them better known. A year later, he launched the first Seven Lakes Hike. Today, there are guided tours between five and 104 kilometers in length, day and night. For so many hikers, wide, firm paths and compromises are required.
Like the tour to the Trages slag heap, which has the highest elevation in the area. However, the route there leads along the B95 federal highway. Claudia Siebeck is therefore designing a new hiking trail for the Leipzig Region Tourism Association. It will connect seven lakes but will avoid main roads and asphalt. “I based it on the criteria of the German Hiking Association,” she says.
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A floating island
Siebeck’s trail starts in the center of Neuseenland on the shores of Lake Cospuden, which the people of Leipzig affectionately call “Cossi” and where they enjoy water sports and beach volleyball in summer. You can learn that wherever a lake has been created, villages have also been dredged up at the Place of Lost Places in Großzössen or on the floating cultural island of Vineta in Lake Störmthal.
But people have reclaimed the landscape. “Swimming, cycling, and hiking are the three main needs of guests,” says Siebeck. And all of this is possible around Leipzig – in a truly unique setting.
The German original of this article was published in 2017.