Abandoned villages, tranquil art, and growing cathedrals of waste: beauty can sometimes be found in the strangest places. These Geotreasures take you past industrial ruins, poetic facades, and spiritual gardens where plants, sculptures, and concrete intertwine. Five places where wonder is the standard, and stillness turns into movement.
Street art paradise
A half-hour drive from Antwerp, at the mouth of the Scheldt River, lies Doel. Since the government's plans to build a container dock here (which never happened), the village has been abandoned and turned into a ghost town. While conviviality and entertainment are certainly hard to come by, the silence and emptiness in a setting of abandoned buildings with boarded-up windows, overgrown gardens, and car-free streets is captivating. Especially since the empty buildings are now covered in graffiti and street art, creating a surreal and photogenic environment. The artworks are not only impressive for their size, but they also tell the story of the village's history and the residents' struggle against the destruction of their community, as some of the works are created by local artists.
The Iron City
The Industrial Heritage Route covers a distance of four hundred kilometers and passes the most impressive monuments from the Ruhr Area's 150-year industrial past. One of the most special stops is the "iron city" Ferropolis in Gräfenhainichen, Saxony-Anhalt. This open-air museum, with five gigantic excavators (up to 30 meters high and 120 meters long) in a former lignite mining area, resembles a set from a dystopian science fiction film. The combination of a beautiful lake, beaches, and forests made it an excellent location for festivals and events.
Biblical garden
Behind the St. John the Baptist Church in Hoofddorp lies a unique sculpture garden: the Biblical Garden, an initiative of Pastor Kees van Lent. How biblical? Well, most of the trees, plants, and herbs growing there are also mentioned in Scripture, and among the greenery are more than fifty sculptures of biblical figures and scenes, 46 of which were created by Karel Gomes (1930-2016). About the largest sculpture he created for the Biblical Garden, Jacob's Wrestling, the artist said in 2005: “This is Jacob, who, according to the Old Testament, wrestles with the Angel, but I think here he is primarily wrestling with himself.” Alongside the wrestling patriarch of the Israelites, you find a young, innocent Eve amid apple trees; Francis of Assisi, flanked by a wolf, spreading his arms to the heavens and jubilant over the entire creation in which there is room for man, plant, and animal; and also a bald, destitute, and utterly disfigured man named Job. Stroll around this biblical scene, pick herbs in the garden, admire the statues, and wander through the labyrinth that symbolizes the journey of life. Once past the gate, no need to wait, for there is God in the garden. Free access.
Wall poems
Anyone visiting Leiden can't miss them: 120 wall poems adorning facades, each with its own special themed route. Choose, for example, a walking tour past eight poems from before 1880, ten poems written in unusual scripts, or wall poems in which freedom plays a significant role. You'll be enjoying the fresh air while simultaneously gaining new insights. On the website below, each poem has its own page with background information. Below, you'll find what inspired a poet to write it. Moved (1968) by the surrealist poet Chris van Geel: "I saw a painting / in which a fish swam / back and forth." Did he see a fish swimming back and forth and was it moving his mind? Or was he fantasizing about movement on the canvas, perhaps while he was painting? Moved At least it stirs the mind. Just like the other wall poems.
Wallpoems.nl
Ecocathedral
In 1966, philosopher and landscape architect Louis Guillaume Le Roy (1924-2012) was commissioned by the municipality of Heerenveen to design a kilometer-long and twenty-meter-wide strip of public space. Using thousands of loads of paving stones, curbs, tiles, and residual waste from road workers, the self-proclaimed "ecotect" single-handedly built the first eco-cathedral. The stones and other materials are loosely stacked, not laid in brick, so that animals and plants can use the spaces between them to grow and build nests. The work is being done without a plan, so there are no preliminary drawings of how the area will develop. The intention is for this land art project near the Frisian village of Mildam to last until the year 3000. This time is necessary to study the endless processes between humans and nature. To ensure continuity, the Stichting Tijd (Time Foundation) was established, which also aims to initiate similar projects in the Netherlands and abroad.
