Seven Mountains - Geo Hike: Himmerich

About 35 meters below the summit, there is a plateau on the southwest side from which you have a good view over the entire Bad Honnef, the Löwenburg, the Drachenfels, and some smaller mountains of the Siebengebirge. This plateau and the steep wall leading to the summit document the former use of Himmerich as a quarry for extracting Latite. Latite is a volcanic extrusive rock named after the central Italian region of Latium, one of its main distribution areas. Latite is the volcanic equivalent of Monzonite. It is related to andesites. The main components are plagioclase, sanidine, and pyroxene. In addition, it also contains augite, hornblende, and biotite. In a fine-grained to dense ground mass, there are inclusions of plagioclase, sanidine, and pyroxene. The mineral occurs not only in Latium but also on Stromboli, in the French Massif Central (Puy de Dôme), as well as in Germany - precisely in the Siebengebirge. The rock can be used as a building material. Numerous buildings were constructed with it, including the now only existing ruins of the Heisterbach Abbey in Königswinter.