스판겐베르그‬에서 가장 멋진 ‪20‬개의 천연기념물

According to legend, Mother Holle imprisoned young girls here and turned them into kittens.

The cascades are part of the sewage system of the Hirschhagen explosives factory, which began producing TNT in 1938. Initially, the toxic wastewater was channeled into the Losse, but this caused considerable environmental damage in Helsa and further downstream. In 1940, a 22 km long canal was built to the Fulda to relieve the pressure. However, this was not enough. The course of the Rohrbach was changed and the cascades were built to regulate the flow rate. Jewish women were forced to do forced labor here.

And based on the folk tale of the Meißnerberge by Karl Christoph Schmieder (1819): "Mrs. Holle especially took care of the poor girls who were left unfaithfully by their fiancés. Many of them were vain and addicted to cleaning. Each wanted to be the most beautiful, and there was much envy and strife among them. When Mother Holle came home one day and noticed the quarrels, she got angry. She shook her magic bell and immediately the girls were transformed into cats. They were banished to a rocky cave on the evening side of the Meißner. The cave is now called the Kitzkammer. From there the cats had to spread all over the mountain and serve Mother Holle. They had to show the good wanderers the way, but lead the bad ones astray.”

The cascades are an artificial watercourse that was built at the end of the Second World War and still carries the water from the Rohrbach into the Losse today.

The 130 years of mining caused the water level on the Stellberg to fall sharply and yet large amounts of water broke into a pit on two occasions, so that mining was finally stopped. Instead, an opencast mine was built in 1962 and the basalt top layer was removed, but 5 years later the mine was completely shut down and the pit filled with water. There are large stones on the Stellbergsee that offer a nice place to sit. The lake can be easily circumnavigated.

The Kitzkammer got its name from a fairy tale about Mother Holle - Kitz does not stand for fawn, but for cats. In winter you should take every step carefully, because it can get very slippery.

Good trail to ride. Challenging and steep at the cascades!

You don't even think that cascades can be found here. Definitely worth stopping.