Andreas

Speich

The Wilderness-Park Zurich has been declared as a special swiss national park. It consists of the famous multispecies natural forest Sihlwald and the nearby Wildlife Park Langenberg.

The initiative and the concept of converting the 1000 ha natural forest into a full forest reserve was formulated and developed by the then director of Zurich forests, Andreas Speich, since 1985. Earlier the forest was dedicated for timber production since over 600 years.

Die Wilderness-Park is located only 15 km south of Zurich City and became meanwhile an outstanding attraction for the population of Zurich region. The Park is designed and managed for undisturbed insight into and better understanding of the nature processes. The forest complex is in excellent progress for becoming in a near future a "second hand"-primeval forest. Since 1995 the timber harvesting has been completely stopped forever.

The project encouraged forestry scientists to have a closer and deeper look on the rare primeval forests of Europe.