📷 The local gem safari #9 - Castle Birseck (English)

Welcome to a new episode of the local gem safari ! In this series you can send me out to places of your choice and I will report back to you what I stumble upon!

This is how it works: At the end of this post you´ll find the perimeter within which you can send me around once every week. Grab the coordinates or the name of the place of your interest from google maps and post it to the comments. You can either specify what you want me to capture at that location Or you simply leave it up to me to decide what I find worth reporting from there.

The proposal with the most upvotes after the first payout will send me to the next destination and will be rewarded with 25% of the earnings of the first resulting post!

And the winning proposal after the last local gem safari came from: @ocrdu !
Congratulations! 🍾 :-)

And so I geared up and set out to where @ocrdu had sent me:

Coordinates 47.4923436, 7.6284250


So let´s go visit Castle Birseck in Arlesheim in the canton Basel-Land, Switzerland


In this time of the year, chances for nice weather are falling rapidly and so I´m approaching Castel Birseck under cloudy skies.

At the foot of the castle hill is the Grotto of Diogenes, which forms the entrance to a hermitage higher up. The titular patron of the grotto is the Greek Philosph Diogenes, the dispraiser of all self-indulgence.

The way leads further up through naturally formed cave passages...

... until we reach the plain hermitage. It is not proven that a real hermit had ever lived here. Instead, a mechanical doll as a hermit figure has been installed in the interior of the cabin in 1789. Unfortunately, since the cabin and it´s windows were shut, I couldn´t make a photograph of the inside.

Behind the cabin there is an inscription in stone, which praises solitude:
O beata solitudo o sola beatitudo

O blessed solitude, o sole blessedness

Almost there at the castle.

The view back on Arlesheim and the first foothills of the Jura mountains.

The castle itself is closed since October, so I can only catch a few outside views.

The castle Birseck was built in 1243 by the bishop Lüthold of Basel. Traces of fire found in the rock of the masonry indicate that there was an even older structure, on which the castel was built in 1243.

At the end of the 18th century, the castle was no longer used as a residence and it´s decay began. During the French Revolution, parts of the castle and the Ermitage were set on fire by drunken farmers(!) and thereby largely destroyed.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Conrad von Andlau acquired the castle and began to restore it.

(This information is taken from the visitor panels on the site and Wikipedia)

I hope you enjoyed this little trip to the Castle Birseck. Don´t miss the second part of this episode, where you can enjoy a tour through the beautiful park that is located at the foot of the castle.

And let me know in the comments where you want me to go next! This is the perimeter that I can cover for you:

15 km max from downtown Basel, Switzerland (47.560696, 7.586765):

• Go to google maps -> using this link <- and browse the map within a maximum distance of 15 km to Basel, Switzerland.
• If you find something that catches your interest, right click on the location and select ´What's here?´from the context menu to obtain the latitude and longitude coordinates.
• Add the coordinates and/or the name of the place to the comments. If you wish you can further specify what exactly you would like me to report from there. I will use my GPS to get there as close as possible.

Don´t forget to also check out the previous posts of the local gem safari:

• LGS #8, In the forest
• LGS #7, Museum Tinguely
• LGS #6, Zoo Basel, Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3
• LGS #5, The Goetheanum
• LGS #4, Castle Ruin Rötteln
• LGS #3, Downtown Basel
• LGS #2, Jurassic Encounter in Basel
• LGS #1, The Vitra House

Please note that the imitation of this format using your own perimeter is HIGHLY APPRECIATED! The goal is to eventually achieve global coverage with the #localgemsafari tag - and I can´t make this alone ;-)

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Follow me at @shaka

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All images were recorded on November 7 by myself with a Canon EOS 7D and a Tamron AF 18-270mm f/3.5-6.3 lens and published on Steemit first.