25 years UNESCO World Heritage Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz
At the weekend, a new tourist season will be heralded in the Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz with the ‘Spring Awakening’. The palaces of Oranienbaum and Luisium as well as the castle, the Gothic House, Stein Island, the Bible Tower and the historic inn ‘Zum Eichenkranz’ in Wörlitz will open their doors to the public once again.
At the same time, the Spring Awakening marks the start of a special anniversary year: 25 years ago, the Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz was awarded the title of UNESCO World Heritage Site. The World Heritage Committee recognises the Garden Kingdom as an outstanding example of landscape design during the Age of Enlightenment, which harmoniously combines art, education and economy. This cultural landscape is still beautiful and instructive today! The palaces with their valuable art collections and interiors, the historic gardens, including the famous Wörlitz Park, and a multitude of small architectural structures, churches, dykes and avenues are harmoniously interwoven into the picturesque floodplain landscape along the Elbe and Mulde rivers. The Garden Kingdom is regarded as the cradle of the English landscape garden as well as classicism and neo-Gothic in Germany. The scenic combination of the six parks is unique and offers a remarkable variety of stylistic periods. Visitors can experience cultural history from Baroque to Rococo to Classicism in a very small space; Oranienbaum Palace even has room settings from the Bauhaus period.
The UNESCO anniversary will be duly honoured in the coming months with events, publications and campaigns. They are intended to raise awareness of this unique heritage and invite people to discover its diversity, beauty and wealth of ideas.
Discovery highlights 2025
Garden Kingdom app:
The first official description of Wörlitz Park by August von Rodes was published in 1788. In this anniversary year, visitors are invited to discover the beauty and history of Wörlitz Park digitally for the first time with the Garden Kingdom app. The app will be launched just in time for the opening of the season. It is the perfect companion for your next visit. The app offers easy orientation with a detailed map, exciting facts about the history of the landscape garden, explanations of individual buildings and sculptures, fun rallies and a plant scanner that helps to identify unusual plants in the park. It can be downloaded free of charge at app.gartenreich.de.
25 treasures of the world heritage:
In 25 themed guided tours on Thursdays at 4.30 pm from April to October, the staff of the Dessau-Wörlitz Cultural Foundation present lesser-known treasures of the Garden Kingdom: be it special plant treasures, moving works of art or more remote architectural monuments.
Readings at the Luisium:
The ‘Lectures in the Luisium’ series, which invites authors with a connection to garden art, landscape design and regional themes, is also celebrating its premiere. Among others, the renowned poet Daniela Danz will read from her poetry collections ‘Wildniß’ (2020) and ‘Serimunt’ (2004). Susanne Tauss will present a staged reading of Justus Möser’s ‘Das englische Gärtchen’ on 4 May 2025. All readings will take place in the Luisium ballroom.
Discovery rucksacks for children:
Special discovery rucksacks have been developed to offer even the youngest visitors an unforgettable experience. With the help of detective equipment, short stories and creative tasks, the ‘Garden Detectives’ backpack tour invites young guests aged 4 to 9 and their accompanying adults to playfully explore the park around the Gothic House. Interested families can borrow the rucksacks from May 2025 for a hire fee and deposit at the Gothic House and use them individually.
Exhibition:
Volcanoes, gods, megalithic tombs – Antiquity and the Garden Kingdom
You can encounter antiquity at every turn in Wörlitz. From 28 May, a special exhibition in the Haus der Fürstin in Wörlitz is dedicated to the many facets of the 18th century’s enthusiasm for antiquity and shows the creative use of travel memories, antique collection objects and copies, antique themes and forms with which contemporaries made antiquity unmistakably their own. The exhibition will also include replicas of prehistoric burial sites in the Garden Kingdom – a layer of monuments that has recently been the subject of sensational new discoveries.
Special edition of the Garden Kingdom Magazine:
From April 2025, readers will find 25 themed articles on the UNESCO World Heritage Site in a special edition of the Garden Kingdom magazine. The articles highlight special features of the cultural landscape, current construction, restoration, research and exhibition projects and acquisitions, but also provide an outlook on future developments.
Illustrated book:
‘Wörlitz. Geometry of a dream’
Staged visual axes are important design elements in the landscape garden. The illustrated book creates an awareness of the beauty, significance and fragility of the views in the Wörlitz grounds. This is achieved through artistic photographs by photographer and publisher Janos Stekovics, who has been taking pictures in Wörlitz Park for over 30 years and has captured it in atmospheric images. The large-format photographs are accompanied by essays by Andreas Platthaus (head of the feature section of the FAZ) and Prof. Dr Harald Meller. The illustrated book is now available from the Garden Kingdom Information Centre and the shops in our palaces (49.80 euros).