Only a stone’s throw to the Baltic Sea, at night the waves roar, the caravan is in the dunes – in Prerow it’s possible. However, part of the rainbow camp will be cleared and returned to nature.
Prerow (dpa/mv) – 75 long-term campers have to vacate their pitches in the rainbow camp holiday resort on the beach in Prerow by the end of the year. The area is located in the Vorpommersche Boddenlandschaft National Park on the Baltic Sea peninsula of Darß. The company Regenbogen AG also examines the other permanent camper sites in the facility, which was founded in 1991, and checks whether they are “national park compliant”. Therefore, all 423 permanent campers initially received a notice of termination.
The background to this is a change of ownership in March of this year, when the state-owned Foundation for the Environment and Nature Conservation Mecklenburg-West Pomerania acquired a large part of the area from the federal government. “Unfortunately, due to the intensive use, the biotopes used were impaired,” said the Ministry of the Environment in Schwerin at the time.
“It’s not about making a campsite disappear, it’s about making the campsite smaller and operating it on the outskirts and in the national park in a way that suits the meaning and purpose of a national park,” explained foundation manager Björn Schwake. The foundation is contractually bound by the deadline, which expires on December 31, and penalties are payable to the federal government in the event of a violation.
If there are “isolated cases of hardship” that cannot meet this deadline, the foundation will work with the federal government to ensure that these cases are reassessed and that the penalty payment does not start immediately. “Our foundation will not be a spoilsport if we can do it ourselves. But we have a purchase agreement in which these deadlines are named and fines are paid.”
In 1991, Camp Prerow was the start of the project for Regenbogen AG, which is listed in Frankfurt. “It all started here,” says company spokeswoman Stina Klingbiel. The portfolio now consists of 15 holiday resorts in Germany. “The acquisition or takeover of camping facilities in special natural locations (camping close to nature in the upper segment)” – that is the business purpose.
This is certainly the case for Prerow, because the 44-hectare holiday complex stretches over two and a half kilometers on a dream beach. In the talks, they hoped until the very end that there would be another option after all. “There is no such option, we have to clear Area I. That hurts us too,” said Klingbiel. The permanent campers on the approximately 15,000 square meter area should be made a different offer in areas A-H.
All long-term camping pitches should first be checked by means of an inspection to see whether they comply with the specifications for a national park. It is about the type of enclosure around the caravan or the use of materials such as plastic, which are not allowed in the national park. The foundation and operator want to look for ways together that bring together the interests of the national park and tourism.
“Then we will see whether our ideas and his ideas fit together,” says the foundation’s managing director, Schwake, who also refers to the rules in the purchase agreement. After that, “Area I” is to be closed, then another area is to be reduced by half of the parking spaces and another area is to be closed in ten years. Roughly speaking, 800 of the 1200 camping pitches should remain. “And they should last,” says Schwake.
