Up here you walk over the corridors of the former NATO headquarters. You only see the air shafts, but a visit is also worth it
NATO Headquarters
The former NATO headquarters in the Cannerberg has been reopened after years of renovation. During the Cold War, the necessary (precautionary) measures were taken from political and military circles to be able to detect a possible imminent attack from the Soviet Union and, of course, to repel it. To this end, a number of ultra-secret command centers were set up in Western Europe. One of these centers was located just south of Maastricht, a so-called Joint Operations Center (JOC). A part (with a corridor length of approximately eight kilometers) of the enormous network of corridors between the Belgian border and the Apostelhoeve was demarcated and given to NATO on a long lease by Het Limburgs Landschap. A command center was set up in the greatest secrecy in this quarry. Several hundred people worked underground every day. NATO has used the quarry as a war and training headquarters and the complex has been subject to the State Secrets Act since 1956. In 1963, as a result of the heightened tensions during the Cold War, the headquarters was permanently occupied, day and night, seven days a week. The complex was an important communications center for NATO. The air defense and offensive military operations for the northern half of West Germany were coordinated there. A large part of the Northwest European airspace was continuously monitored. Every flight movement was mapped and studied to determine to what extent hostile acts were prepared or carried out.
When NATO left the quarry in 1992, there was serious contamination with asbestos fibres. An asbestos climate control system installed in the 1960s inadvertently and unintentionally transported a huge amount of asbestos fibres. As a result, the entire quarry was contaminated with asbestos, which mainly deposited on the walls of the porous marl. A thorough cleaning operation took place during which the entire headquarters was 'stripped'. What remains are the impressive ruins of this underground world