Aqua

Beautifully captured Sonja.

Oh, people did build that biotop! It did not just occure.
They also built a brandnew mountain top with extra layers of plastic foil, sand and topsoil on old trash layers.

Before this was the area dump for just anything folks would throw into the bin until sorting for recycling became commonplace, it was an ammunition plant of the nazis. They had a concentation camp outpost with not so nice hygiene conditions and they tested the V2Rockets here. Bombs got littered all over the vincity by planes in order to destroy the site. Then the occupying forces used yet more ammunition to blew it all into pieces as soon they where in control, leaving a huge refillable crater. This became the public dump.

Perhaps animals should still be kept off for permanent use, but better ground is valuable for farming and real estate with safe backyards, so they turned the mount trash into a superficial paradise of green actionism during the last 1 1/2 decades. In the ponds at it's base newts are supposed to roam, toads, frogs, waterbugs and dragonflies. There are many red water lilies, which I think always a bit strange for a renaturated waterbody rather than a decorative pond as we got no native wild red ones, and of course there are several interpretive markers.

But then, interpretive markers where already around in the last years of the dump, and a raptor observation deck. 2004 when we moved into the area, the dump was still famous for huge kite and buzzard kettles all hoping for an easy McRat in the smelley heap up there, storks, herons, falcons, crows, and gulls used to forage as well, all risking run ins with lots of nasty non-palatable and dangerous things, but easy to observe.