Twenty of the most special trees in Rotterdam and their stories were brought together for a different tourist path on Tuesday 17 November. The Dutch municipality has created a 4-kilometre-long walking route along the trees in the city centre and reinforced the experience with augmented reality. They are now accessible to anyone owning a smartphone.
Start a conversation with Rotterdam’s most extraordinary trees
Just like buildings and monuments, trees can be the silent witnesses of important historical events, of our everyday moments filled with joy or sadness. The Dutch city of Rotterdam decided to pay the needed attention to some of its most special trees with an innovative service available to both locals and tourists alike.
A new trail named Bomenroute (Tree Route), 4 kilometres long, encompassing 21 trees will allow passers-by to communicate with trees in vivid colours. The trail is accessible to smartphone users through the Must-See mobile application, enhanced by augmented reality.
After downloading the application and starting to follow the trail, users will be accompanied by a virtual professional guide – tree advisor Ronald Loch – who can be seen as a hologram at special locations part of the tree route.
The route itself is abundant in historical material, archive photos, old film material, but also 3D objects. They allow to discover, for example, how ‘busy’ it is in the Rotterdam underground, to experience in a more vivid way certain locations, like the Lijnbaan plane tree and imagine how it stood in the backyard of the former Coolsingel hospital before the bombing of Rotterdam.
It is also possible to see how the trees on the roof of the Kruisplein garage grow, how the Roof forest on the Depot of Museum Boijmans has been constructed or how the water storage is put together at the Museum park garage.
So, if you want to immerse yourself in an exceptional kind of tourist experience and get to know the city’s natural environment better, do not hesitate to download the free mobile application. Alternatively, you can also read the stories of each tree (in Dutch) on the trail online. The route starts at Rotterdam Central and takes approximately 1.5 hours and will guarantee you a quality corona-proof leisure time.
Source: TheMayor.EU
