Paradise

Paradise

Flora and fauna have recaptured their terrain in many parts of this vast site. And so the World Heritage Site Völklinger Hütte is not only an exemplary place of industrialisation, but also a place of nature. This is most evident in "Paradise", the green wilderness where the coking plant used to be.

Like a mysterious earthly Garden of Eden behind an impregnable wall, it rested untrodden for almost 25 years: the area between the coking plant and the Saar. Animals and plants were able to come together, undisturbed, in the shade of the blast furnace group – truly paradisical. Fish, frogs and lizards meet foxes and wild boar. Today, birch trees and buddleia flourish amongst the former coke batteries in an area that was once one of the toughest places to work, where heat, dust and fire reigned. What used to be "hell" is now truly a paradise