The Drentsche Aa National Park has been around for almost 25 years, and attracts the natural beauty of the best -preserved Beekdal. But all the time it was missing a decent visitor center, with information about this special stream and esdorpen landscape. This will change from April 16, thanks to a rigorous conversion of the former congregation center De Zenten in Deurze to the house of the Drentsche Aa.
This new house from the Drentsche Aa will be the gateway to the National Park from 16 April. And in addition to a visitor center, it also includes a bistro for a snack and a drink, four sleeping rooms such as Bed & Breakfast, and at a later stage there will be a roof shed with an educational center, a viewing hut at the Beek and a decking path with fishing spots for children.
For educational assistant André Brasse of the Drentsche Aa National Park, the space is in the former back room. Because even though this spacious place is its domain as an exhibition space, tell in those square meters, but once the complete history of the Drentsche Aa area that takes 400,000 years.
“We set it up in three parts. Of course we start with the origin, that is the Ice Age. With the melting of the ice layer, the thick flints that stayed behind, the mammoth bones and the melt water as a source of the stream. Then we go to the origin of the Esdorpen landscape in the second part, and then come to the nature reserve as it looks nowadays.
For more than a year he has been puzzling, how the whole story around the kilometer -long stream, with all its natural beauty and all esdorpen around it, can best be told. “But you also have to omit things, because the space is only limited.” But he certainly doesn’t do that about the tight room. Because Brasse has long been happy that, after almost 25 years, there is now a real visitor center. “I think it’s great, don’t you see that broad grin?”
“We have had to do it all this time with a network of entrepreneurs in the area, who performed, as it were, as hosts for visitors to the area. And although there was an information point in the Oude Homanshof in Anloo for a while, but it was unmanned. Just like an information space at the Schaapskooi. A nice place behind the Balloërveld, and the getting to the Getting and the Balloërveld. That was finally going to be so beautiful.
A total of 750,000 euros in a subsidy has become available, from all kinds of involved area partners, to provide the house of the Drentsche Aa with a visitor center with a retrospective exhibition. The rest of the millions of renovation will be borne by the owners of the building, who have been busy for two years now.
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