Pinneberg

The Pinneberg is the highest elevation of the North Sea island Helgoland and the Schleswig-Holstein district Pinneberg with 61.3 m above sea level.

The peak is an elevation of a crater rim a few meters above the level of the upper land, created in 1947 by the blasting of bunkers. It can be reached by a short trail from the cliff edge path. About 400 meters further northwest, at the northwest end of the island, stands the rock needle Lange Anna.

For a long time, the elevation was perceived only as part of the part of the Oberland with gorges and uplifts, which was particularly strongly influenced by the war. Thus, around 1960, the joking name "Franconian Switzerland" is found on Helgoland maps for this part of the Oberland, and in the Hamburg edition of the Baedeker, this name was still used in 1992. The topography there is still changing today, the gorge behind the Pinneberg is slowly being filled in as a landfill for excavations. Defining this part of the upland is the radar tower of the Bundeswehr, which had to be tousled away on illustrations during the Cold War. The elevation itself remained nameless for a long time and was marked only by a survey point. The name Pinneberg was not proposed until 1998. In that year, a summit cross was erected there by mountaineering friends from Itzehoe, whose humor in this designation alludes to Helgoland's affiliation with the county of the same name. In May of the same year, the same group had also marked the highest point of the neighboring district of Steinburg as Itzespitze. The name Pinneberg has been taken up by the island administration in tourism marketing since 2013, when the elevation was voted the most beautiful place in the Pinneberg district by readers of a local newspaper. The cross is made of aluminum, is supported laterally by two struts and is located next to the stone of the survey point. In contrast to the island map of the Helgoland spa administration on its website, the maps of the island brochure of the same spa administration and the Schleswig-Holstein State Office for Surveying and Geoinformation do not list Pinneberg by name.