Friedrich Heinrich Mine Park

In March 1998, miners at Friedrich Heinrich colliery in Kamp-Lintfort extract a total of 20,262 tonnes of workable coal on a single day - a world record which is hardly surprising for a site that has set technological standards before, namely as the first European colliery to be fully mechanised. And yet nothing can avert the end of coal mining: neither the merging with Niederberg colliery to form the so called West Mine in 2002 nor the spectacular performance of Kamp-Lintfort miners pulling a coal wagon all the way to Berlin with nothing but their own muscle power. On 21 December 2012 - some 100 years since the colliery was founded - the final shift pulls in.

Ever since, Kamp-Lintfort has been reinventing itself, with the former mining facilities at its heart. Because without them, the town would not even exist - without them and the industrial pioneer Franz Haniel, who, during a test drilling in 1854, demonstrates that the coal deposits of the Ruhr region extend to the left bank of the river Rhine. Half a century later, the brand-new French-German Friedrich Heinrich Coal Mine stock corporation finally embarks on the construction of the colliery. Within a few years, a two-shaft mine with brickworks, housing estates, commercial buildings, schools, churches, streets and squares is built to replace the two former villages Kamp and Lintfort. At the centre of the new town sits the stately Friedrich-Heinrich Avenue, flanked on the colliery side by a string of ornate gable-fronted façades dramatically set against a group of white plastered mansions and a casino. Above it, tall and towering, stands the town' s landmark, the headgear, clearly visible from afar.

This setting, now a listed heritage site, provides the impressive scenery for a popular horticultural show in 2020. As a result, visitors enjoy a magnificent view from the pithead's 70-metre platform all the way to Duisburg. The close neighbourhood, of course, is also part of the picture: the historic mining town with civil servants' housing estate and newly arranged colliery park; the heritage centre, illustrating the work and everyday life of former pitmen in a miner's home and a training gallery; an adventure park with state-of-the-art facilities for animals and associated therapeutic and recreational activities; and, not least, the new urban infrastructure including a campus of the RhineWaal University of Applied Sciences, thus symbolising Kamp-Lintforts successful transformation.