Boulders

The large boulders you see lying there in the middle of nature are the fascinating result of a massive human intervention: the area you walked through used to be not a forest, but an enormous open-air factory! [1, 2]

The story behind these rocks and their unusual position in the landscape can be explained quite simply and logically by the history of open-pit mines: [1, 2]

1. Blasting away the mountains

In southern Luxembourg, iron ore (the minette) lay buried deep beneath thick layers of limestone and worthless rock for millions of years. When mining shifted massively to open-pit methods after the Second World War, giant excavators and powerful dynamite blasts were used to completely blow away and excavate the hilltops and slopes to reach the iron ore buried below. [1, 2]

2. Worthless rock was left behind

The giant boulders you see today were what was known at the time as overburden. They were enormous chunks of limestone and hard rock containing little or no iron. The miners broke these blocks loose but left them on site along the edges of the vast excavation pits because they had no economic value. Only the pure iron ore was transported by little trains and trucks to the steelworks in the valley. [1]

3. The great illusion: Nature took over

When the mines finally closed in the 1970s, they left behind a barren, apocalyptic moonscape of deep ravines, steep cliffs, and piles of abandoned stones. Since the area was officially protected in 1994 as the "Haard, Hesselsbierg, Staebierg" nature reserve, nature has had free rein for 50 years. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Trees, shrubs, and grasslands have grown around and over the abandoned boulders. Because the forest is now so dense and lush, it seems to hikers as though the stones were magically dropped there, right in the middle of untouched nature. In reality, yesterday you were walking on the floor of an old, deep excavation pit, and the stones have simply remained where people once dumped them. [1, 2, 3]

It is a spectacular, cosmic wink: what began as brutal destruction by humans has been transformed by the power of Mother Earth into a breathtaking paradise where fauna and flora flourish. [1]

Eddy&Rita