Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe — urban park
Image by Barni1 from Pixabay

Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe

  • 2 min read
  • 51.317° N 9.400° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • The copper skin of the Hercules statue is made of hand-forged sheets only two to three millimetres thick, riveted over a wrought-iron skeleton.
  • The whole figure weighs about 7.8 tonnes, of which the iron frame accounts for more than five tonnes and the copper shell about 2.5.
  • The statue was assembled from 21 prefabricated segments and hoisted onto the summit monument on 30 November 1717.
  • Its maker was confirmed only in 1900, when a copper plaque naming the Augsburg goldsmith Johann Jacob Anthoni was found inside the statue's head.
  • The water features were already being demonstrated in 1714, three years before the Hercules figure was set on top of the monument.
  • Below the octagon lies the head of the giant Enceladus, half-buried under boulders, and during the water show a jet spouts from his mouth.
  • From the highest water outlets beneath the Hercules down to the Neptune Basin at the foot of the cascades, the water drops about 105 metres.
  • The Löwenburg was built between 1793 and 1801 as a deliberately ruined medieval castle and counts among the earliest neo-Gothic buildings in Germany.
  • Landgrave William IX, who became Elector William I in 1803, was buried in 1821 in the vault beneath the Löwenburg's chapel.
  • Under Jérôme Bonaparte's Kingdom of Westphalia the palace was renamed Napoleonshöhe, and in 1918–19 Hindenburg directed the army command from Wilhelmshöhe.

Why it is worth it

Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe climbs the whole eastern face of the Habichtswald above Kassel, and it was built to be read from the top down. At the crest, on the Karlsberg, stands the Hercules monument: a massive stone base topped by a pyramid, the whole about 40 metres high, and a copper statue of the demigod about 8.5 metres tall, a copy of the ancient Farnese Hercules made by the Augsburg goldsmith Johann Jacob Anthoni. Below it a staircase of water — the Great Cascade, some 350 metres long — drops straight toward the city, and at the foot of the slope the neoclassical Schloss Wilhelmshöhe closes the axis. Covering about 2.4 square kilometres, it is the largest hillside park in Europe.

The park was the work of several generations of the landgraves of Hesse-Kassel. Landgrave Charles commissioned the Italian architect Giovanni Francesco Guerniero, who began the Hercules and the cascades in 1701. By the 1780s taste had moved from Baroque formality to the English landscape garden, and William IX recast the lower park accordingly: Simon Louis du Ry designed the palace, while Heinrich Christoph Jussow added romantic set pieces — the mock-medieval Löwenburg castle, a "ruined" Roman aqueduct, the Devil's Bridge over Hell's Pond. The last major addition, a large waterfall, came in 1826. UNESCO listed the park in 2013 for its monumental Baroque architecture and its water features.

Those water features are the reason to time a visit. Water collected in reservoirs behind the Hercules is released and runs downhill for about 2.3 km through channels, valves, a water theatre, grottoes, cascades and waterfalls until it bursts out of the Great Fountain in a jet more than 50 metres high, a height that made it Europe's tallest fountain when it was completed in 1767. On the published schedule the show runs from 1 May to 3 October on Wednesdays, Sundays and public holidays, starting at the Hercules at 14:30 and reaching the Great Fountain around 15:45, so visitors can walk down with the water from station to station. Special illuminated evening shows are held on a few dates a year.

The palace at the bottom now belongs to the Kassel state museums and holds a gallery of Old Masters that includes the second-largest collection of Rembrandts in Germany. Its history is layered too: Jérôme Bonaparte kept his Westphalian court here, the captured Napoleon III was held here in 1870, and Wilhelm II used it as a summer residence. Parts of the Hercules have been under long-running restoration, so expect scaffolding in places.

Getting there

The park lies on the western edge of Kassel; Baunatal is about 7 km away. Kassel Airport (KSF) is about 11 km away; many visitors arrive instead by train at Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe station on the Hanover–Würzburg high-speed line. Tram line 1 runs to its terminus at Wilhelmshöhe (Park), at the foot of the park; from there it is roughly a half-hour climb to the Hercules, or bus 23 goes up to the top.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Germany 87The Most Beautiful City Parks 17The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Germany 21The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Gardens, Parks and Forests 61The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests 232The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe is a landscape park in Kassel, Germany. The area of the park is 2.4 square kilometres, making it the largest European hillside park, and second largest park on a hill slope in the world. Construction of the Bergpark, or "mountain park", began in 1689 at the behest of the Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel and took about 150 years. The park is open to the public today. Since 2013, it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its monumental Baroque architecture and its unique fountains and water features.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

51.31670, 9.40000per Wikidata