Wörlitzer Park
Interesting facts
- The Iron Bridge of 1791 was the first cast-iron bridge in Germany and on the whole European continent, a scaled-down copy of the Iron Bridge at Coalbrookdale in England.
- The Gothic House has two completely different faces: the canal side imitates the Venetian church of Madonna dell'Orto, while the garden side is in English Tudor Gothic.
- Beneath the artificial volcano stands the Villa Hamilton, dedicated to Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy in Naples who hosted the prince on his visit to Vesuvius.
- During the 1938 pogrom the synagogue's interior was wrecked, but garden director Hans Hallervorden saved the building itself and lost his job for doing so.
- Wörlitz Palace was fitted with innovations the prince had seen abroad, including food lifts, doors that slide into the walls and a bathroom below the bedroom.
- The park has 17 bridges, each in a different style; the steps of the White Bridge grow flatter towards the middle and steeper again, as a symbol of life.
- The High Bridge was built so tall that walkers on the nearby chain bridge appear from it to float in the air.
- Rousseau Island in the park imitates the island at Ermenonville where the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was buried.
- Goethe, Hölderlin, Novalis and Schinkel all stayed at the inn the prince built at the park gate, whose rooms were named after cities such as London, Paris and Constantinople.
- The gardener Johann Leopold Ludwig Schoch is buried under a grassy mound in the part of the park he himself laid out.
Why it is worth it
Wörlitz Park is a garden built to teach as much as to delight. Across meadows, lakes and canals on the edge of the Elbe floodplain, its paths lead from a Neoclassical country house to a Gothic Revival villa, a small Pantheon, a synagogue shaped like a Roman temple and, on a rocky island, an artificial Vesuvius that could be made to appear to erupt with staged light, sound and water effects. Bridges and paths connect the separate garden areas, spread over about 112 hectares, and the views are arranged so that buildings, water and farmland appear one after another like scenes in a sequence.
The park was the creation of Prince Leopold III Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau and his friend the architect Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff; on his travels the prince had been guided through Rome by the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Laid out from 1769 with the gardeners Johann Friedrich Eyserbeck and Johann Leopold Ludwig Schoch, it was one of the first English landscape gardens on the European continent. Erdmannsdorff's Wörlitz Palace, finished in 1773, is regarded as the first Neoclassical building in Germany, while the Gothic House, begun in 1774, took its inspiration from Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill. The synagogue of 1790, modelled on the Temple of Vesta, reflected the prince's religious tolerance, and the tower of St Peter's Church, completed in 1809, rises 66 metres above the town as a landmark for the whole park. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, the prince opened much of the garden to the public from the start and meant it to serve as a school in architecture, gardening and good farming.
Wörlitz is the best-known part of the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm, a cultural landscape of parks, palaces, dikes and avenues that Leopold and his successors spread over some 142 square kilometres between Dessau and the Elbe. UNESCO inscribed the Garden Realm as a World Heritage Site in 2000. The small town of Wörlitz sits right beside the park, and its streets run directly into the garden.
Getting there
The park lies on the edge of the town of Wörlitz, about 12 km east of Dessau. The nearest airport is Leipzig/Halle (LEJ), about 49 km away.
On these lists
51.84810, 12.42330per Wikidata