The story
Maschsee Lake Festival in Hanover
The Maschseefest is a roughly three-week summer festival along the shore of Hanover's Maschsee, an artificial lake completed in 1936; the festival itself began in 1986 to mark the lake's fiftieth anniversary. Billed as Germany's largest lake festival, it draws about two million visitors to lakeside stages, food stands and nightly fireworks reflected on the water.
Hanover's Maschsee is itself an engineered lake, completed in 1936 as a public-works project that turned marshy ground south of the city centre into a 78-hectare recreational basin, and the festival now held on its shores began in 1986 to mark the lake's fiftieth anniversary.