Through the audioguide, you get access to a speculative future of these grounds.
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You can find it on the Mailbox next to the entrance of the house in Sandhöhe 10.
Often slightly altered but preserved in their basic substance, the houses of Finkenwerder hold memories of past times, when it still was an enchanted fishing village.
So does the half-timbered house in Sandhöhe 10, which I invite you to visit.
It was built 200 years ago. Since then, the house has had different owners and has been renovated and partly rebuilt several times, but the gable inscription has endured. At two parts of the beam, you can even find fragments of the original beam integrated.
The content of this inscription is evidence of the constant danger lurking behind the dikes. Due to its closeness to the North Sea, the river Elbe during the winter months regularly carries storm floods. These can raise the water level up to six meters above normal, leading to tremendous destruction, which we counter by building dikes. Without such a storm flooding Finkenwerder wouldn't exist.
In the Allerkindleins Flood in 1248 the water split the historic island Gorieswerder into several smaller parts, and Finkenwerder was born. Just around 1800 the inhabitants of the island finished its embankment, which allowed the population to boom. Since the severe storm surge of 1962, where several dikes broke, Finkenwerder has been connected to the mainland by newly-constructed dikes and has thereby practically lost its island-identity.
The river is a gate to the world, which helped to develop the region and fuelled the economy of Hamburg, whose growing industries now wash away the idyll of the once fishing village.
