Zeche Zollverein – World Cultural Heritage
written by camerao
on May 9th, 2008
(0 votes)
Zollverein in Essen was the largest modern colliery of the world. This industrial complex was designed in symmetrical Bauhaus Style, and formed the heart of Essen’s quarters – Katernberg and Stoppenberg, where most of the miners lived in small houses or flats, with gardens on the back to cultivate potatoes and vegetables, have a goat for milk (this goat they called “miners cow”), and sit there after work to smoke a pipe and talk with the neighbors.
In 1986, under protest of more than 3000 miners, which lost their work, the industrial plant was closed, and had a quiet sleep for years, in which
nature takes the area back. Then, instead of pulling it down, the government decided to buy it, for conservation as a historically important industrial building. Since December 2001, the “industrial and cultural landscape Zollverein” in Essen has been preserved as world heritage.
Now the area is used for a lot of cultural and leisure activities. You’ll find there the German Design Center, the “Ruhrlandmuseum”, you can enter the most spectacular escalator you’ve ever seen, and the PACT-Center for Modern Dance. You can bike around the area in green nature, or walk together with old miners trough the buildings. In wintertime, the place where the cole was Cooled, were frozen for slithering, and all over the year you’ll find a lot of art exhibitions in the different buildings.
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