Himmelteich Nature Monument

Heaven and hell are sometimes much closer together than one would biblically believe. And the devil is not always in the details, sometimes also in the big historical picture. A particularly vivid example can be found in deeper Transdanubia, not far from the so-called Seestadt Aspern. There is still water, an innocent piece of nature, as one could easily think, girdled contemplatively by reeds, water lilies in the middle: the sky pond. On the part of the Viennese city administration, however, the Himmelteich area is known under a rather infernal attribution: namely as "Altlast W3". In the municipal waste portal it reads as follows: “A former gravel pit was filled with approx. 150,000 m3 of household waste and construction rubble by 1970.” The associated “considerable risk to the groundwater” was averted between 1991 and 2001: among other things by “clearing the deposits and the contaminated subsoil ”. The redevelopment, in turn, was followed by the construction of a biotope, which we encounter today as if it had never been otherwise: so biotopic that it has now even been accredited as a natural monument. So much for the ultimately pleasant side of the Himmelteich story.