The best hikes from bus stations around Bois de la Cambre - Terkamerenbos

A solid wood bridge crosses the Horseshoe Pond, which is thus divided into two parts.

A 1600m long racecourse ideal for interval training. It has a fine gravel surface.

To the right of the pond, an impressive rock formation with a waterfall was built in 1869. It is 8 m high and 13 m wide. This evocation of an Alpine landscape consists of rocks of sculpted concrete (masonry, rubble and reinforced concrete) and rubble. A small arched bridge in mortared brickwork and a parapet of imitation branches runs over it. The mechanism that pumps water from the pond to feed the waterfall has long been out of order and bricked up.

Don't go on a Sunday when the weather is nice. Crowds of walkers, joggers, cyclists...you can't hear the birds singing anymore!

Sculpture

Here we see a watercourse, which is enough for a beaver. If the beaver builds a dam here, it can become a pond or a lake in two or three years. The animal can change an entire ecosystem, simply because its dam retains water and rain. These natural beaver dams are very efficient in combating floods and droughts, because they regulate the flow of small watercourses. Locally, they can shape the forest through flooding by flooding parts of the forest, causing the tree vegetation to die. When the beavers leave their dam and their beaver pond, a succession from pioneer forest to climax forest can start again after the reservoir has drained.

Beech forests are the end point of spontaneous forest evolution, they form the climax vegetation in places that are not too dry, too warm or too wet. If nature were to take its course, the beech would cover most of our continent. Old, almost untouched beech forests are extremely rare in Europe today and are mainly found in places that are difficult to exploit or develop. Compared to the rest of the world, beech forests are among the seriously endangered habitats in Europe, even though the beech as a species is not endangered. For this reason, the few remaining old and untouched European beech forests that have not or hardly been changed by humans have been included on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This cross-border heritage includes 94 sub-areas in 18 countries. Since the end of the last ice age, the European beech has spread from a few isolated refuges in the Alps, Carpathians, Dinarides, the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees over a large part of the continent in a relatively short time, a few thousand years. The success of the beech throughout Europe is due to its adaptability and tolerance to different climatic, geographical and physical conditions. These forests contain an invaluable population of old trees and a genetic reservoir of beech and many other species that depend on these old forest areas. Throughout the year and during their life cycle, beech forests undergo different stages and processes. From the germination of young trees that grow close together in their first years, to decades of competition for space, water and light, the growth into impressive trees, and finally the decay and breakdown. Without human intervention, these natural processes unfold in an undisturbed way. Together, over tens and even hundreds of years, these typical wilderness phenomena shape the forest. Please note: this information is a general description of the UNESCO World Heritage site, which is located elsewhere in the Sonian Forest. In 2017, five parts (located in Ticton, Joseph Zwaenepoel and Grippensdelle) of the Sonian Forest were recognised as UNESCO World Heritage as part of the ‘Ancient and pristine beech forests of the Carpathians and other regions of Europe’. It is the only UNESCO natural world heritage site in Belgium.

Here, thanks to good forest management, we can see how the ecosystem of a natural forest works: you can see that large branches and dead tree trunks are left here because they are part of the ecosystem. They contain a special biodiversity, such as insects that help break down the wood of the branches and trunks, and many birds, such as woodpeckers, that feed on these insects. In the past, dead or diseased trees were removed because it was thought that this was important for a healthy forest. But preserving these trees as part of the ecosystem actually contributes to the health of the forest. A dead tree in a forest is usually a place with high biodiversity, compared to a forest where all the trees are the same age, all healthy and where all the dead wood has been removed.