Green World Heritage Site on the River Neisse
The landscape park in Bad Muskau, one of the few binational UNESCO World Heritage Sites, is celebrating its founding 200 years ago.
“A park should be like an art gallery”, said Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau: “Every few steps you should see a new picture”. In 1815 the nobleman laid the foundation for his open-air gallery and announced that he wanted to make his home town of Bad Muskau “beautiful with a large and splendid garden”. It took another 30 years before the landscape architect was able to complete his garden art work on the banks of the River Neisse in Saxony: green pictures formed by majestic trees, winding paths, picturesque lakes and streams, sprawling meadows and singular bridges and buildings. Over 800 hectares, the Bad Muskau Park is today the largest landscape park in the English style in Central Europe. The approximately 350,000 visitors who annually come to the park can explore it by foot, bike, coach and boat.
Symbol of German-Polish rapprochement
Another special feature of the park is its binational history. In 1945 the park was cut in two by the new German-Polish border. One third of its area now lay on the German side, two thirds on the Polish. World War II had destroyed many of its buildings and bridges and left the gardens overgrown. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the lifting of the Iron Curtain between Eastern and Western Europe, Prince Pückler’s realm on the Neisse flourished again. Since 1989, monument conservationists on both sides of the border have been cooperating in their work of restoration to preserve the park as a harmonious total work of art. In the 1990s the cooperation was intensified and developed into a showcase project of international monument conservation. In 2004, UNESCO recognized the German-Polish efforts to preserve their common cultural heritage: the historic landscape park was put on the list of the UNESCO World Heritage. Since 2011 the English Bridge, which was destroyed in the war, again unites the two parts of the park. It is not only a distinctive architectural structure, but is also looked upon as a symbol of German-Polish rapprochement.
