Qualla: Dusseldorf-Unterbach

Dusseldorf-Unterbach: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marek Gehrmann, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cross over from the rest of Dusseldorf into Unterbach during Carnival and the chants change. In the city proper, revelers shout Helau like they do across the Rhineland. In Unterbach they shout I-A - the German way of writing a donkey's bray. The borough has its own carnival board, its own pair of princes, and a live donkey leading the parade. The mascot stands cast in bronze near the shopping center at Breidenplatz, mid-jump over a small stream called the Eselsbach, or Donkey Brook. Behind the joke is a working memory: the sand that built much of low-lying Dusseldorf was once hauled on the backs of donkeys, west along the road still called Sandtragerweg - the sand-carriers' way - from the gravel pits at the edge of town. When the saying Unterbach's donkeys are coming reached the city, it never referred only to the animals.

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Image: Marek Gehrmann | CC BY-SA 3.0

Dusseldorf-Unterbach: A Water Castle in the Woods

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ilion, CC BY-SA 3.0. Haus Unterbach gave the neighborhood its name and its medieval bones. The water castle was probably built in the Carolingian era, perhaps around 900 AD when Hungarian raiders burned nearby Gerresheim almost to the ground and locals retreated behind walls and a moat. The knights v...

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Image: Ilion | CC BY-SA 3.0

Dusseldorf-Unterbach: The Lake Made by Excavators

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Marek Gehrmann, CC BY-SA 3.0. At Unterbach's center is a lake the locals call the Baggerloch - the excavator hole. The Unterbacher See is 87 hectares of water and up to 13.4 meters deep, with four islands designated as bird sanctuaries and no surface inlet at all. Groundwater feeds it. Crews dug it between 19...

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Image: Marek Gehrmann | CC BY-SA 3.0

Dusseldorf-Unterbach: Where the Hills Begin

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kameister, CC BY-SA 4.0. Unterbach sits at the southeast edge of Dusseldorf, where the first hills of the Bergisches Land - the duchy's old hill country - rise out of the flat Rhine plain. Most of Dusseldorf is built on alluvial mud and sand. Here the land lifts, climbing from the lakeshore at the foot o...

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Image: Kameister | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dusseldorf-Unterbach: Donkeys and Trampolines

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Christian Winkgen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Two things distinguish Unterbach in the regional imagination: the donkey and the trampoline. The trampoline came in 1968, when the sports association TV Unterbach 1905 produced a German pupil champion and the team took third place in the national pupil crew championship the same ...

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Image: Christian Winkgen | CC BY-SA 3.0