Qualla: Cottbuser Ostsee

Cottbuser Ostsee: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 23 December 2015 the last coal train pulled out of the Cottbus-Nord open pit and ran the short distance to the Jänschwalde power station. Nine years later to the day, the water standing in the hole that train left behind reached 62.5 metres above sea level - the target line, the mark at which engineers could finally call the flooding finished. Between those two December dates a mine turned into something German can only describe with a pun. At 18.8 square kilometres the Cottbuser Ostsee is now the largest artificial lake in Germany by surface area, and a city that spent a century looking into coal has a shoreline.

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Cottbuser Ostsee: Four Villages, 220 Million Tonnes

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The pit opened in 1975 and gave up coal from 1981 until the end of 2015: 220 million tonnes of lignite, burned almost entirely at Jänschwalde a few kilometres to the north. Getting at it meant removing everything that lay on top, and what lay on top included people. Groß Lieskow,...

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Cottbuser Ostsee: A River With Nothing to Spare

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Flooding began on 12 April 2019 and stopped fourteen days later. The water had to come from the Spree, and the Spree did not have it to give; a dry Brandenburg spring left the river too low to divert. Filling resumed in early 2020 after better rainfall, and then it crept. By Dece...

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Cottbuser Ostsee: Der See, Die See

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The joke in the name works only in German, and only just. Ostsee is what Germans call the Baltic - the East Sea - and the new lake lies east of central Cottbus, which was all the licence anyone needed. What separates the two words is grammatical gender and nothing else: die See i...

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Cottbuser Ostsee: Panels on the Water, Boats on the Bank

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Infrastructure arrived ahead of the water, which took a certain confidence. The quay wall of the Cottbus city harbour was completed in August 2019, when the basin below it was still mostly dry ground. A sports-boat harbour with a hundred berths opened at Neuendorf in November 202...

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Cottbuser Ostsee: Wide, Shallow and Entirely New

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Superlatives here need care. By surface area the Cottbuser Ostsee has overtaken the Geiseltalsee in Saxony-Anhalt, itself a flooded lignite pit - but the Geiseltalsee holds around 423 million cubic metres of water against Cottbus's 126, more than three times as much in a smaller ...

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