NaturaGart Diving Park: The Idea
NaturaGart's clients benefit from our more than 30 years of experience. During this time NaturaGart has supplied expertise and construction materials for more than 50,000 ponds. And currently this sum increases by more than 1,500 ponds every year, of which more than 500 are swimming ponds. In the early 1990's it became clear that the company would soon reach its limits using conventional adevrtising. We therefore decided to build a park to exemplify the use of our products. Since then several ponds have been created, among which are three that were constructed using about 1,000m² of pond liner.
Many different types of ponds in a unique park landscape.
The ponds showcase examples of improved quality of life in the garden.
The ponds have bays, peninsulas, streams... all the details that can be conceived for a pond. After having implemented all the important options, the idea of a pond like had never before been thought of - or built - was born. This pond was to take liner technology to the limit. The most diverse imaginable underwater landscape for a pond was to be constructed.
Beautiful pond landscapes can be seen in the Park, such as here in front of the administration building...
...but we wanted a body of water that was unparalleled on earth.
Thus the idea for the Underwater Park was born. It had to be big enough for scuba divers to be able to dive through. We wanted to build things that others could not even imagine - and, of course, awaken interest for our products.
And it worked: Countless features in newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations reported about the construction and opening of the Underwater Park, the sinking of a ship and so on.
Unparalleled in diversity: A diving park with caves and cliffs.
Media events such as the spectacular sinking of a ship.
By 2007 about half a million visitors had come to see the Park. Hundreds of thousands followed its construction on the Internet. Most importantly for us: Tens of thousands bought their ponds at NaturaGart. Traditional advertising would have been much more expensive.
Tens of thousands of visitors attended the guided tours.
The project called attention to NaturaGart like nothing else could have done.
We wanted to build a pond that was unique in the whole world. We wanted to take liner technology to the limits. We thought about reef-like cliffs, light filled caves, a lost temple, a rotting shipwreck. We imagined an underwater gorge with bizarre rock formations that produce mysterious shadows in the lake's twilight.
A narrowing gorge increases the sensation of entering a different world.
This is the 'other world' - a temple scenery at the bottom of the diving park.
We built breaches into the rock through which glowing rays of light break into the caves' twilight.
We developed an underwater wilderness like no other on earth: Rock cliffs on top of which water lilies grow, a maze of chambers and broken walls.
The underwater park is always an impressive show of light and shadow.
Divers enjoy the light effects in the caves.

The drama of an ideal underwater experience was created at the drawing table:
The slow descent into the gorge, the entry into crater landscapes, the return to the light, the tentative entering of a maze of corridors in a large cave, the gently rising path to the light-flooded exit point.

Cave diving: In other places this can be dangerous...
...here an emergency exit is always within reach.
The impressive experience is always enhanced by a period of 'cooling down' afterwards.
By getting back down to normal, the experienced events are enhanced. At the same time the threshold to the next exciting stage becomes higher. We therefore developed a series of cooling off areas in between such as a landscape with loose boulders, a lagoon with a forest of water lilies and sandy surfaces above which large fish circle.
Experience nature: A large school of fish in the lagoon.
This can only be found here: Large sturgeons in the temple area.
And we built it.
Not everything was constructed as it had originally been planned. Usually it became much more spectacular. The original plan for the temple was for it to be in a gap in the wall, but enthusiasm while building led to the construction of a huge complex with the volume of three bungalows.
The originally planned, simple passageway ended up as a maze of criss-crossing corridors.
The temple's hall of pillars is 5 metres high and 20 wide.
The cathedral: This spacious cavern is part of a complex system of caves.
And when we saw that we had mastered the technique, we built three of them - over 300 metres long in total.
Construction hasn't been like this for centuries: Of course we had a plan - but in the end that was more of a guide. Decisions weren't made at the drawing board but on the building site.
It would have taken years to design on the computer what was finally constructed.
Each new cave became better than the previous one: This one is 40 metres long and up to 5 high.
Some corridors lie above others or cross each other.
Instead, the details came up in those minutes when ideas flowed: At the construction site the steel rods were shaped into corridors - only then did the structural engineer come to calculate the statics and authorise construction.

We grew at and with the construction. We constantly extended the limits of what we had previously thought was possible. With each ton of rock and each cubic metre of concrete good ideas became even better realities.
A cave's skeleton: Kilometres' worth of structural steel.
Many were sceptical about the plan: An over 100m maze of structural steel.
Each implemented idea was the seed for another, even better one.

Those who experience the Underwater Park become multiplyers of this idea, and embassadors for NaturaGart's pond construction expertise. Every photo that is taken and every second of film made is ultimately advertising for the company.
A bizzare fantasy landscape lies submerged in the depths of the lake.
Every photo that is take also says something about NaturaGart.

It was great fun to develop the ideas for the Underwater Park ever further. Many scuba diving trips to the Red Sea, for example, gave us a feel for the lighting effects we wanted to create in the caves. The best, however, was to dive down into this underwater world for the first time, and to see that everything was just as we had imagined it would be.

Breaches in the roof of the temple hall create these spectacular light effects...
...which also exist in the caves - this is the consequent realisation of an idea.