Admittedly, Berlin is not exactly known for winter sports. We can go ice-skating in the city, but there aren’t exactly many mountains in Brandenburg that offer snow sports. A real insider tip is therefore the ski resort just 90 minutes from Berlin. Bad Freienwalde (Oder) is also home to a unique sporting attraction that you would hardly expect to find so close to Berlin: Germany’s northernmost ski jumping arena!
Four ski jumps in the “Papengrund”
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Located only about an hour’s drive north-east of the capital (approx. 60 km), the ski jumping facility in “Papengrund” is a permanent fixture on the German winter sports map. It is the only one of its kind in Brandenburg and serves as a state base for ski jumping and Nordic combined.
There are a total of four ski jumps here, which are named after well-known personalities or sponsors: The Kurstadt-Schanze is the largest – distances of over 70 meters can be reached here. From the tower, you can see far into the Oderbruch and as far as Poland! The Sparkassen-Schanze is an intermediate hill for advanced jumpers and youngsters, the hill of the town of Bad Freienwalde is suitable for junior jumpers and the K 10 hill is for the very first attempts at jumping.
Ski jumping all year round – with a celebrity factor
The special thing about the Bad Freienwalde ski jumping arena is that you can jump here all year round. This is because all four ski jumps are covered with plastic mattings: In summer, you land on irrigated mattings, which makes training independent of snow. If it snows enough, you can of course also jump on natural snow.
The facility is operated by WSV 1923 Bad Freienwalde e.V.. The club is known for its excellent work with young athletes and regularly hosts official competitions such as the Brandenburg Cup and the North German Championships. The Papengrund also attracts sporting greats time and again: ski jumping legend Jens Weißflog, for example, is a regular guest and supporter of the facility.
So if you’ve always wanted to try out ski jumping, you don’t have to travel all the way to the Alps. It takes around 60 to 70 minutes to reach Bad Freienwalde from the center of Berlin via the B158. And the regional train (RB60) runs directly from Eberswalde to Bad Freienwalde. The ski jumping facility is about 20 minutes’ walk from the station.