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Mühlsteinhöhlen Hohenfels-Essingen

Mühlstein Caves Hohenfels-Essingen54570 Hohenfels-Essingen

In Hohenfels-Essingen, experience a small but impressive cave labyrinth, created by mining millstones. The Mühlstein caves in Mühlenberg in Hohenfels-Essingen are accessible all year round via a small circular path.

The Mühlenberg above Hohenfels-Essingen, with its Marien grotto, is not only a place for devotions, but with numerous small caves it is also a paradise for families who want to get close to volcanism in a playful way.

Like Swiss cheese

The mountain was riddled with holes like Swiss cheese by human hands. Its agglutinated basalt slags - glowing, almost liquid scraps that were deposited on the crater rim during eruptions and joined together to form a firmly baked, coarse-pored rock - are perfect as millstones or building material. The Eifel people attacked the mountain's treasure with hammers and chisels and left behind a number of small, slightly sloping caves during their painstaking work. A veritable labyrinth of holes emerged, the “Sweden Fortresses”, “St. Martin” or “Borussiahöhle”.

In some places you can still see how millstones began to be broken out of the mountain. On the mountain side facing away from the village of Hohenfels you can see a still active hard basalt quarry that cultivates a monumental solidified lava lake. An abandoned quarry area, which adjoins towards Betteldorf, is being reclaimed by nature and shows the typical basaltic column shapes with its network of paths.

With caution and a flashlight

The Mühlsteinhölen are accessible all year round through a more than three kilometer long adventure trail that begins at a barbecue and children's playground and initially winds up a steep path until it branches off in the summit region of the Mühlenberg. Pious Eifel residents built a romantic Marian grotto out of the dark lava, which is still cared for today and used for devotions in the middle of the forest. The caves nearby can be entered with caution. Don't forget the flashlight!

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