European Heritage Volunteers - The historic park of the old "Waldlust" Grandhotel

The “Waldlust” Hotel in Freudenstadt, founded in 1899, was a first choice resort of a noble society of spa guests. It stands as a historic architecture building, as a cultural heritage treasury, as a long time social meeting place in a high rank – a unique symbol of a former golden period of town development. During the 1st third of the 20th century the hotel took a breathtaking career, carried by the arrival of many world famous guests – kings, queens, princes, poets and artists. “Waldlust”, the leading hotel of Freudenstadt, came to success by the entrepreneurial genius of a widespread hotel dynasty, the Luz family, who owned and managed several well known houses in Freudenstadt, Baden-Baden and Austria. Today the old palace with its impressive size and scenery and its glorious “personal” history offers us a review back to a golden era, almost unimaginable for such a small town deeply embedded in the Black Forest woods. The Freudenstadt Association for Heritage is highly ambitious to preserve the splendid architecture as a cultural heritage site of a great age. Therefore it undertakes rooftop repairing and other constructive measures, carries out conservation works as well as preventive measures against the loss of art. The association also informs about the great history of the heritage site by guided tours and by public relation efforts of all kinds. The “Waldlust” Hotel is surrounded by a wide park area, which formerly served as an old style wellness and leisure time retreat for the noble high society clientele: with broad promenades, nicely built in the steep hillside, with stone walls and stair cases as well as intimate sitting opportunities, which offers marvellous outlooks. This once very characteristic Grandhotel leisure ground had been fallen to oblivion in many years. Forms and structures had gone lost, due to the absence of any gardening and cultivation – until the “Denkmalverein” started to restore paths and interesting places of this traditional ground.