Landschaft von Menschenhand

Cultural Area of the Lower Lusatian Heath Landscape

About 130,000 years ago, the retreating glaciers of the Saale Ice Age shaped the surface features of the landscape in the Lower Lusatian Heath Landscape Nature Park – but the character of the landscape today also clearly bears the mark of human activity. At the latest since the modern era, humans have significantly influenced the landscape, creating new settlements and water bodies in a dynamic process, cultivating open land and forests, straightening rivers, and extracting mineral resources. The nature of the landscape is not constant but the result of continuous change. Land uses begin and end, change, and continue in different forms or other locations. This route invites cyclists to discover on a day trip how humans have shaped the landscape. It runs along paths that seem to have been drawn with a ruler, past pits where mineral resources were once extracted, and through extensive heath carpets that, although their existence is also due to human activity, now offer a true natural spectacle when they glow purple in late summer.