BeethovenWanderweg - His love for the landscape

On a 15 km route, partly on the Rheinsteig trail and well-known long-distance hiking trails, we want to provide insights into Beethoven's landscape around 1780 to culturally and nature-interested visitors with the help of a landscape mediation system. There was neither Drachenburg Castle, Nibelungenhalle, nor the Grandhotel Petersberg. The quarrying of stones was omnipresent, and the Heisterbach Monastery, with its abbey church, pond systems, and vineyards, was in full bloom. In the Rhine plain, the villages were small, picturesque, or not yet founded, and fields and vineyards stretched to the banks of the Rhine. Instead of forest taverns, ruins stood on the mountaintops, and small paths led up to them instead of cogwheel railways. With the Beethoven Trail, we take you into the world of the great composer and hiker Ludwig van Beethoven. The trail is marked for a counterclockwise hike!

Ludwig van Beethoven, born in Bonn and baptized on December 17, 1770. Bonn is his birthplace, childhood and youth place, and the place of his musical education and shaping of Beethoven. This formative early and mature period with many authentic Beethoven sites is a unique feature because Ludwig got to know his nature-influenced surroundings through excursions and hiking trips.

Source: the French composer and music critic Hector Berlioz (1803-1869), who visited the first Bonn Beethoven Festival in August 1845 and stayed in Königswinter, reports from eyewitnesses who told him that Beethoven often came across the Rhine in a skiff to dream and work in the Rhine plain. In order to make these local and natural influences on Beethoven's works visible to visitors and locals, the Bonn Beethoven Anniversary Society initiated a Beethoven tour through Bonn and the Rhein-Sieg district. 22 BTHVN steles were created to strengthen the connection of all places of his youth and the sustainable enhancement of the city of Bonn as a Beethoven city. Three steles were installed in the Siebengebirge, describing the life and work during Beethoven's time at the Heisterbach Monastery, Petersberg, and Drachenfels plateau. To ensure that these steles do not stand alone at these undoubtedly remarkable places for Beethoven, these locations were connected with a hiking trail.