Das Hardt – Gmuends Sonnenhuegel
The Hardt – the sunny hill of Schwaebisch Gmuend
The Hardt district is located on a hill between the river Rems and the creek Struempfelbach. The southern part of the residential area was built in the 1950s. Especially displaced people found a new home here after the Second World War. The northern part was the housing area for the US armed forces until 1991. When they left Schwaebisch Gmuend, the Gmuend municipal housing association VGW bought the houses and quickly rented them to numerous people looking for accommodation.
The streets in the northern part are named after Schwaebisch Gmuend's twin towns (Antibes/France, Bethlehem/USA, Barnsley/England and Székesfehérvár/Hungary). The roads in the southern part bear the names of the regional mountains of the Ostalb region (Zwerenberg, Falkenberg, Scheuelberg).
Its residents are as young as the city district: about half of them are children and young people under the age of 20. And the quarter is very diverse: people from over 30 nations live together in a good and enriching coexistence, door to door.
Since 2016, a new belt of urban public spaces is being created on the Hardt with subsidies from urban development funding, which connects all existing and new parts of the district with one another, rearranges the building development and overcomes the separation by the street Oberbettringer Strasse.
Der Rundweg am Sonnenhügel
The circular route on the „Sonnenhuegel“
The circular route on the Sonnenhuegel runs in a southerly direction along the street Hardtstrasse, past the University of Education (PH Schwaebisch Gmuend) and its sports field. Below the PH-crèche, a park bench with a wonderful view of two of the Drei-Kaiser-Berge (lit. three emperor-mountains), the mountains Stuifen and Rechberg, invites you to linger.
It then continues in a north-westerly direction on the other side of the University of Education past the vocational school center along the forest.
At the end of the northern part of the path, above the „World Garden“, you have a great view of part of the east town of Schwaebisch Gmuend, the district Herlikofer Berg and a part of the Remstal (valley of the river Rems) in an easterly direction, before you can then return to the starting point of the path, or take the street Oberbettringer Strasse along the fifteen minute walk downhill to the Staufer town.