The story of the Spreep­ark Plän­ter­wald is one of the most ridicu­lous around Ber­lin. It was pretty dif­fi­cult to find entrance up until a year ago — shut down and watched closely by secur­ity, it became every pho­to­graph­ers chal­lenge to snap a couple of shots of the decay­ing, rusty games and rollercoasters.

The enter­tain­ment park in Treptow-Köpenick used to be the only one in the former GDR. It opened up in 1969 as “Kul­tur­park Plän­ter­wald” right by the Spree. From 1989 til 2001 it became the “Spreep­ark Ber­lin” with some new attrac­tions for fam­il­ies and their chil­dren. But soon enough the park had to close down for the lack of vis­it­ors (due to the high entrance prices) and the owner, Norbert Witte, announced the Spreep­ark was insolv­ent. He tried to ship his attrac­tions to Lima to counter his debts, but soon it was clear that that was not his only inten­tion. Within the “Fly­ing Car­pet” attrac­tion, he had attemp­ted to smuggle 180 kg of cocaine. What a daredevil.

In any case, people ended up in jail and the park was destined to rot away. Nowadays there’s a spe­cial ini­ti­at­ive try­ing to make the park a new, lively part of Ber­lin. From this sum­mer on there’ll be tours around the leftover attrac­tions, includ­ing the impress­ive fer­ris wheel. The pic­tures I took are from last year and should give an impres­sion of the ghostly urban atmosphere.