Eberswalde, Brandenburg, Germany

🇩🇪 Eberswalde is a major town and the administrative seat of the district Barnim in the German State of Brandenburg, about 50 km north-east of Berlin. The town is often called Waldstadt (forest town), because of the large forests around it, including the Schorfheide-Chorin Biosphere Reserve. Despite this fact, Eberswalde was an important industrial centre until the German Reunification.

Eberswalde has access to the federal highways (Bundesstraße) B 2 and B 167 and the highway (Autobahn) A 11-E28. Eberswalde station is located on the Berlin–Szczecin railway line that first connected Eberswalde and Berlin in 1842. It is the starting point of the railway lines to Templin and Frankfurt (Oder) and was terminus of the Eberswalde-Finowfurter-Eisenbahn (EFE) to Finowfurt until it was discontinued.

The town and its industrial areas are on the Oder Havel Canal and Finow Canal waterways. The airfield Flugplatz Finow is a former Soviet Air Force base that was handed over to civil use in 1993.

Economy While Eberswalde was renowned for its thriving heavy industry in the past, since the fall of the wall, it has fallen upon harder times. As the East German government fell, state support vanished, and factories had to suddenly compete with more efficient firms in the West. As a result, many factories in Eberswalde went under, and visitors can see the remnants of these abandoned plants across town. Like many former East German towns, Eberswalde has since struggled with unemployment, and many have left the region in search of work elsewhere. Consequently, many of the huge Soviet-Bloc style apartment complexes in Eberswalde (most notably the Brandenburgisches Viertel) are becoming empty, and are slowly being razed.