Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm founded by Leopold III, Duke of Anhalt-Dessau
The Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm, (German: Dessau-Wörlitzer Gartenreich) is a cultural landscape and World Heritage Site in Germany, located between the city of Dessau and the town of Wörlitz in Central Germany. One of the first and largest English parks in Germany and continental Europe, it was created in the late 18th century under the regency of Duke Leopold III of Anhalt-Dessau. Today, the cultural landscape of Dessau-Wörlitz encompasses an area of 142 km2 (55 sq mi) within the Middle Elbe Biosphere Reserve in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. Because of its exceptional landscape design and testimony to the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment, the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm was designated as a world heritage site in 2000.Origin
The Gardens had its origin in the 17th century, when the marriage of Leopold's great-grandfather Prince John George II of Anhalt-Dessau to the Dutch princess Henriette Catharina, daughter of Prince Frederick Henry of Orange (Dutch: Oranje), in 1659 brought a team of engineers and architects from the Low Countries under the supervision of architect Cornelis Ryckwaert to lay out the town, the palace and a Baroque garden in the former settlement of Nischwitz, which was renamed Oranienbaum in 1673. The Dutch influence remained prevalent in the Principality of Anhalt-Dessau for many decades. 
In 1758, Prince Leopold III became the Duke of Anhalt-Dessau, and five years later he and his friend, the architect Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff, embarked on a Grand Tour across Europe. The tour (in particular the ancient architecture of Italy and the English landscape gardens), and the ideals of The Enlightenment they encountered abroad heavily influenced their artistic tendencies. The two men aimed to move from the formal garden concept of the Baroque era to a more naturalistic landscape, as they had seen at Stourhead Gardens and Ermenonville.As early as 1765, Leopold III began to make architectural and landscape changes to the countryside in order to realize these ideals. The Wörlitz gardens served as the starting point of the programme, becoming the first landscape garden in continental Europe. Over the next 40 years, Leopold adapted or developed several other parks and palaces to fit the Enlightenment aesthetic, including the Oranienbaum Palace, Georgium Castle, Mosigkau Castle, and Großkühnau Castle.Wörlitzer Park
The central Wörlitzer Park lies adjacent to the small town of Wörlitz at an anabranch of the Elbe river, making it rich in water and diversity. It was laid out between 1769 and 1773 as one of the first English gardens on the continent. According to the ideals of Duke Leopold III the park would also serve as an educational institution in architecture, gardening and agriculture, therefore large parts were open to the public from the beginning. Most buildings were designed by Erdmannsdorff, while the gardens were laid out by Johann Friedrich Eyserbeck (1734-1818), a garden architect who was indebted to such English antecedents as Claremont, Stourhead and Stowe Landscape Garden. The gardens are protected from floods of the Elbe river in the north by a dam which is also a belt-walk offering numerous views along the park's sight lines.
Wörlitz Palace finished in 1773, the residence of Duke Leopold and his wife Louise of Brandenburg-Schwedt, was the first Neoclassical building in present-day Germany. The palace and its interior with valuable cabinets from the studio of Abraham and David Roentgen as well as a large collection of Wedgwood porcelain were publicly accessible. Louise had her private home in the adjacent Graues Haus (Grey House). At the eastern rim of the palace's garden stands the Wörlitz Synagogue built in 1790 as a rotunda modeled after the ancient "Temple of Vesta in Tivoli, Italy. The building expressing Leopold's religious tolerance was saved from demolition in the 1938 "Kristallnacht" pogrom by the custodian of the park, who thereupon lost his employment. The Neo-Gothic St Peter's Church in the west with its 66 m (217 ft) tall steeple was finished in 1809.
The philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the aesthetic of Johann Joachim Winckelmann underlie the design of the park and will lead to the creation of follies. Rousseau saw agriculture as the basis of everyday life and pointed out to educational functions of the natural landscape. Unsurprisingly, the most elegant landscape in the area is Rousseau Island in Neumark's Garden, scored to imitate the island at Ermenonville Park where the philosopher was buried.
An island on the artificial Wörlitz Lake features Europe's only artificial volcano. When Leopold III went on a grand tour of Europe in the 1760s, he was captivated by a trip to Naples in which he saw a smouldering Mount Vesuvius and would have heard about the newly-discovered town of Pompeii. Twenty-two years later, the German royal set about bringing a piece of Naples to Germany; he had his architect build a brick inner building nearly five stories high and cover it with local boulders. At the top, a hollow cone was made and contained a high chamber, complete with three fireplaces and a roof that contained an "artificial crater" that could be filled with water. He then constructed a lake around the volcano and invited his friends to watch an eruption. Only contemporary accounts detail what the 18th-century artificial eruption would have been like, but the practice still takes place today, complete with modern effects, after the island was restored to its past glory.Minor structures of the Garden Realm, stretching for some 25 km, had far-reaching ramifications in architecture of Central Europe. The "Gothic House", started by Erdmannsdorff in 1774, modeled on the villa of Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill, was one of the first Neo Gothic structures on the continent. The park also features replicas of Roman temples, including the Pantheon built in 1795. In the early years of the following century, the landscape was enriched with the Neo-Gothic churches in the neighbouring villages of Riesigk (1800) and Vockerode (1811).
The grounds, which had been divided into four parts since the construction of a railway line and the Bundesautobahn 9 in the 1930s, were designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000. ICOMOS, however, noted that "the overall structure of the landscape has undergone a good deal of deterioration".