View of the Loreley Rock

One of several beautiful views of the Loreley rock.

Germany's most famous rock

The Loreley is one of the most famous places in Germany. Viewed without emotion, it is an almost vertical rock face that towers over the Rhine by 132 meters and ends in an almost flat crest. Due to its imposing size, the striking shape and an extraordinary echo that was perceptible in earlier times, the Loreley was always given special attention. For generations, visitors from all over the world have traveled to the monument to discover its special features and to enjoy the spectacular panorama of the Rhine. Countless artists found inspiration for their works here. From whichever direction you look at the Loreley - the rock is a phenomenon: this place combines scenic beauty and myth, eventful history and an extraordinary variety of nature. The special fascination brought Wolfgang Oertel von Horn 1881 in his description - The Rhine, history and legends of its castles, abbeys, monasteries and cities in two sentences vividly expressed: The Lorelay ... rises to a proud height, and her foot rests deep below the level of the Rhine, which has its deepest point here. Who, who has traveled along the beautiful banks of the Rhine, does not stand before the soul in an indelible memory? Source: text information board

Ancient and wrinkled

The steep cliffs in the narrowest section of the Rhine Valley open up a view of the history of our landscape. They tell of the events of the past millions of years and bear witness to the unimaginable forces that shaped their appearance today. The Loreley owes its special shape to the geological development, without which the myth would never have come about. The history of the Loreley began 400 million years ago. At that time, in the Devonian period, the area of what is now the Middle Rhine was near the South Pole in a strait between two continents. Over thousands of years, material was deposited on their soil, which the rivers had washed in from the continents that were still bare of vegetation. Under the weight of the hundreds of meters of sediment that followed, the rocks that make up the rocks today were formed: slate and sandstone. In the subsequent Carboniferous epoch, the continents moved towards each other due to shifts in the earth's crust and collided. As a result, the sea space in between was pushed together and folded, and the former seabed was raised to form a mountain range about 320 million years ago. The gentle landscape of the plateau above the rocks bears witness to the time when the Rhine, a few million years ago, at the end of the Tertiary, flowed north as a sluggish, meandering stream in a wide valley. The Loreley plateau was formed about a million years ago during the first great ice age, when the Rhine created a level bed here. The steep rock face is the result of the most recent events in the history of the earth: Driven by the forces in the hot interior of the earth, the Rhenish Slate Mountains are being raised. This forces the river to dig deeper and deeper into the rock. In doing so, he changes direction, using weak zones in the earth's crust. This resulted in the large number of loops, the narrowest of which prepared the Loreley rock out of the rock over the course of almost a million years. Source: text information board