Wasserkunst

In Hanover's Herrenhausen Gardens, the Wasserkunst is the waterworks behind the Great Fountain. It lifts and directs the water that drives the jet in the baroque Great Garden. Duke George of Brunswick-Lüneburg made Hanover his residence in 1636, and the garden grew under Girolamo Sartorio, architect and water engineer. Getting enough water, and enough pressure, proved the hardest part of the whole design.

Early attempts relied on tanks fed by wooden and lead pipes, and they failed. In 1690 the architect Johann Friedrich de Münter proposed a scoop wheel on the Leine, with horse-driven mechanisms to raise the pressure. The idea that finally worked came from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: a canal from the Leine feeding a dam with a water wheel. The dam went up in 1718, and by 1720 the fountain threw water thirty-five metres high. Between 1863 and 1865, an iron system with large water wheels and Egestorff pumps replaced the original works. That machinery lifted the jet to sixty-seven metres, and a later electric pump raised it further.

Restoration work began in 2013, and an official reopening followed in June 2023. You can reach the site without steps, and since 2021 the historic pumps have run again, sending water to the surrounding moat. From the garden you can watch a jet that climbs to eighty-two metres.