Paradise rises from old German coal pits

Massive cleanup aims to draw tourists to new land of lakes, canals, bike paths

As the GROSSRAESCHEN, GERMANY sun beats down on a small vineyard by the rippling waters of Grossraeschen Lake, there’s little sign of the vast wound that lies beneath.

Meuro, the brown-black pit that once dominated the landscape, providing jobs to thousands of workers who toiled in clouds of lignite coal dust, has vanished. Only a floating excavator plucking sunken trees out of the water hints at the effort that’s gone into reshaping this corner of eastern Germany over the past decades.

It’s part of a massive environmental cleanup in Lusatia, a region that provided much of the coal that heated German homes and powered the country’s industrial rise.

Unlike its darker variety, lignite seams — also known as brown coal — often lie close to the surface, meaning it is easiest to just remove layer upon layer from above rather than dig underground shafts.

“This is a region that was shaped by strip mining for hundreds of years,” said Kathrin Winkler, a native of Lusatia. “No grain of dirt was left on top of the other.”

As a young woman growing up in communist East Germany, Winkler worked in the Meuro mine for a year. Now it’s her job to promote Lusatia’s lakes as the next big tourist destination, a tranquil retreat for city dwellers from nearby Berlin and Dresden.

Over the past two decades the man-made craters have been slowly resculpted to create 26 lakes connected by 13 canals and hundreds of miles of cycle track.

The horizons are now dotted with wind turbines and fields full

of solar panels. While about 22 per cent of Germany’s electricity still comes from burning lignite — and a further 12 per cent from hard coal — some 33 per cent is now generated using renewable energy.

At its peak three decades ago, Lusatia’s coal industry provided more than 90,000 jobs.

Now, the region only has a few thousand workers at four mines operated by a private company, including the Welzow-South pit that supplies the ‘Black Pump’ power station 20 kilometres east of Grossraeschen.

Helmut Franz, who used to work in the Welzow- South pit, said miners support the work that’s being done. “People have been trying to figure out for generations how to heal the wounds,” said Franz, who now chairs the Senftenberg mining heritage association. “We think it’s a positive thing that the countryside is being reshaped after the end of mining.”

Much of the task of turning brownfield sites into the kind of

“blooming landscapes” promised shortly before reunification to East Germans by West Germany’s late chancellor, Helmut Kohl, has now fallen to a state-owned company, LMBV.

So far it has spent 10.6 billion euros ($16.2 billion) removing the legacy of industry and creating 25,000 hectares (61,775 acres) of lakes.

“You could say that it’s the biggest landscape reconstruction in Europe,” said Uwe Steinhuber, the public face of LMBV. “There’s no script for this job.”

LMBV’s ambitious effort to develop an entire new lake district clean enough for tourism is attracting attention from as far afield as the U.S., China and South Africa.

Wary of the artificial landscape created for tourism, environmental groups have purchased some stretches of land to let nature take its course.

Animals and plants that have been driven from much of Europe’s intensively farmed landscapes are reclaiming areas that were considered dead.

In Grossraeschen, tourism chief Winkler shows off the new marina awaiting its first sailboats. Authorities hope to increase the number of overnight stays from 600,000 annually to some 1.5 million in the coming years, boosting employment in Lusatia.

“It’s not just the landscape that’s changing, there’s also been a big, big change in people’s heads,” said Winkler. “We are moving away from being a former industrial region to one that’s part of the service economy.”