Völklingen Ironworks

For just over a century, from 1882 to 1986, this plant on the banks of the Saar made pig iron, and when the furnaces went cold nobody tore them down. The result is one of the very few ironworks from the 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe or North America to survive complete, which is why UNESCO added it to the World Heritage list in 1994. Walking through it is less like visiting a museum than trespassing in a machine: blast furnaces, conveyor systems and the coking plant still stand where they worked, and the complex keeps the look it had in the 1930s.

The site began as a short-lived steelworks founded by Julius Buch in 1873, which closed after six years and was bought by Karl Röchling. Work on the first blast furnace started in 1881 and smelting began two years later; four more furnaces followed by 1893 and a coking plant in 1897. In 1900 Völklingen became the first large ironworks to drive its furnace blowers with the gas the furnaces themselves produced, and by the 1910s it was Germany's biggest maker of steel beams. That engineering pride sits alongside a darker record that the site does not hide: forced labourers from occupied territories worked here in the First World War, more than 140 of them dying, and in the Second World War over 12,000 prisoners of war and civilians deported from the Soviet Union were put to work in brutal conditions.

The most striking interior is the blower hall, where enormous gas engines once pushed air into the furnaces; parts of it now host exhibitions. The Ferrodrom is a hands-on science centre that explains how iron is made, and visitors can follow routes through the former production areas. Since 1996 a foundation has run the site as a cultural venue, and the rust-coloured structures have become a backdrop for large exhibitions on subjects from Inca gold to ancient Egypt, as well as the UrbanArt Biennale, held here since 2011.

The ironworks is also an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage, which makes it a natural starting point for exploring the old coal and steel landscape of the Saarland. Allow several hours: the scale is considerable, and much of the experience lies in simply moving between the furnaces and halls.

Getting there

The ironworks lies about 1 km from the centre of Völklingen, and Völklingen railway station is roughly a five-minute walk from the entrance. Regional trains (RE 1, RB 70, RB 71) stop there, and Saarbrücken Hauptbahnhof, with long-distance ICE and TGV services, is about ten minutes away by train. The nearest airport is Saarbrücken Airport (SCN), about 20 km away.