Sassenburg lies on the edge of the Lüneburg Heath. Its recreational landscape includes forests, heathland, moors and waterways, with extensive hiking trails for leisure. Großes Moor and Bernsteinsee offer contrasting experiences: the Moorbahn and peat extraction here, water activities there.
Großes Moor: Landscape and Moorbahn
Peat extraction can be observed in Großes Moor. The Moorbahn offers an approximately 2.5-hour exploration trip on a narrow-gauge railway through the moorland within Sassenburg. The Moorbahn starts and ends at Im Hagen in Westerbeck. The covered passenger cars travel into Großes Moor and back at around 6 km/h. The approximate duration is a helpful guide for planning your day; check seasonal operating details before your trip.
Along the way, the Moorbahn explains how peat is extracted and how flora and fauna have adapted to moorland conditions. This brings together the use of the moor and the adaptations of its plant and animal life in a single exploration. At one stop, a boardwalk leads to a renaturalisation pond and a peat-cutting site. An observation platform is located by NABU’s renaturalisation and peat moss ponds.
Hiking trails and circular route
Sassenburg has extensive hiking trails for recreation. The “Großer Sassenburg Rundkurs” connects all the localities and passes through the Großes Moor nature reserve near Charlottenhof. These offer different scales for planning your trip: recreational trails, a route through all the localities, and a Moorbahn trip with a set duration. You can choose what to focus on depending on whether you mainly want to hike, explore the municipality via the circular route, or take a more in-depth tour of the moor.
Neudorf-Platendorf and its local features
Neudorf-Platendorf is still known as a moorland settlement and has Lower Saxony’s longest straight village thoroughfare. These two features offer different points of reference for the village: the name highlights its connection to the moor, while the straight thoroughfare is a distinctive feature of its layout. Neudorf-Platendorf thus complements the nature and moor experiences with a notable feature of the municipality.
Bernsteinsee: Activities on the water
Bernsteinsee is in Sassenburg-Stüde, right beside the Elbe Lateral Canal and amid a landscape of forest, heathland and moor. Activities on offer there include swimming, water skiing, wakeboarding and stand-up paddleboarding. The lake offers a different focus from the Moorbahn and circular route: here, water activities take centre stage; there, the moorland, its use and the links between the localities. Choosing between these themes lets you tailor your stay to the experiences that interest you most.
Cycling in the wider Gifhorn travel destination
The wider Gifhorn travel destination also offers a regional perspective on cycling. The cycling network in Gifhorn district comprises around 700 kilometres of leisure cycling routes, plus around 550 kilometres of everyday cycling routes, including connecting routes. Around 400 signposted nodes can be combined to plan individual cycling routes.
Discover more destinations: Stüde, Schönewörde, Wilsche, Hankensbüttel, Weyhausen, Groß Oesingen, Brechtorf, Steinhorst
Go to the wider travel overview: Gifhorn.
