orecastPeople setting out for the first time usually look for the wrong thing. The bottleneck is not the site, it is the permission. In Germany the ground always belongs to somebody, and anything archaeological is protected in any case. Walking into a quarry with a hammer works almost nowhere.
Almost nowhere is not nowhere. There are places where collecting is expressly part of the offer. You pay an entrance fee, borrow hammer and chisel, and keep what you find. We checked 32 places across Germany one by one, each with its source, and sorted them into three levels.
The three cases
Twelve places are green. Splitting rocks and taking finds home is expressly allowed, usually for a small fee. Nine are amber. It is possible, but with conditions: a permit, a season, the rules of a national park, or the consent of whoever runs the spoil heap. Eleven are red. Those are show mines, protected sites and track surfaces. The trip is worth it, the hammer stays at home.
Where splitting rocks is part of the offer
The best-known entry point is in Baden-Württemberg. At Holzmaden and Ohmden you split slabs of Posidonia shale, 180 million years old, in the Kromer quarry. Ammonites of the genus Dactylioceras, belemnites, fish scales and fragments of sea lilies. Hammer and chisel can be borrowed, and the Urweltmuseum Hauff next door shows what the same rock yields after professional preparation.
In Bavaria there is the hobby quarry at Solnhofen, open daily from April to early November. The lithographic limestone holds fish, crustaceans, ammonites and plants. One piece of advice from the guide applies everywhere: museum first, then hammer. The Bürgermeister-Müller-Museum in the village shows a real Archaeopteryx, and afterwards you know what you are looking for.
For families with smaller children, Dormettingen is the friendliest site. Tools are lent against a deposit at the park restaurant, and Dotternhausen with its museum lies three kilometres away.
If you are after minerals rather than fossils, go to the spoil heap of the Clara mine near Wolfach in the Black Forest. Baryte, fluorite, quartz, and with luck rare secondary minerals in small crystal crusts. Fresh material is delivered regularly. The good things are rarely on top, they sit in the fresh break of unremarkable lumps.
On the Baltic coast you need no tools at all. Between Ahrenshoop and Prerow on the Fischland-Darß-Zingst peninsula, amber, belemnites, fossil sea urchins and holed stones lie in the tideline. The best time is autumn and winter after a north-easterly storm, early in the morning.
Where there are rules
Panning for gold on the Upper Rhine between Efringen-Kirchen and Breisach is allowed, but it pays to start with a course. Rhine gold has been documented since Roman times and consists of flakes smaller than a match head. Gold is nineteen times heavier than water and settles where the current slackens, on the inside of bends and behind large stones.
On Rügen the national park boundary decides. Outside it, near Glowe, Lohme or on the Mönchgut peninsula, collecting in the tideline is possible. Inside it, every stone stays where it is. The spoil heaps of the Upper Harz, the Ore Mountains and the Ruhr work the same way: it depends on the operator and on the individual site.
Where you only look
The Messel pit near Darmstadt is a World Heritage Site. Early horses, bats and crocodiles from a maar lake, 48 million years old, visitable only with a guide. The originals are in the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt and the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt.
At Obernkirchen on the Bückeberg, real dinosaur tracks run through the sandstone, 140 million years old. The same stone stands in churches and town halls across half of Europe.
Red does not mean dull. It only means the find stays in the ground.
Five rules that always apply
- Look, do not dig. Surface finds in small quantities are usually tolerated on freely accessible ground. Digging, hammering at rock faces or taking larger amounts almost always needs permission.
- The ground belongs to someone. A short question to the owner, forester or municipal yard gets a yes more often than people expect. Nobody enters an active quarry on their own.
- Protected areas are off limits. In national parks, nature reserves and protected geotopes everything stays put. Anything archaeological is protected everywhere, and deliberate searching needs a permit from the monuments authority.
- Do not enter old adits and shafts. Shafts are often covered by nothing but rotten boards, and the air standing in an adit is no longer oxygen.
- Significant finds belong in expert hands. Many scientifically important German fossils come from private collectors who worked with museums. And every find gets a note with place and date, otherwise it is just a pretty stone.
The guide to these places
All 32 places appear with a fact sheet in the Treasure Map Germany, a 33-page PDF written in German. For each place: what you find, who it suits, the best time, the tools, address and website, a tip from practice, and the source. Plus the legal situation in twelve federal states on one page, ten common finds to identify, a kit list for under a hundred euros, and a QR code to the map in the app. The guide costs 12.90 euros and downloads immediately.
If you would rather search yourself, the ORECAST map holds two million documented points across Europe, each with its source.
Sources
- Operator and municipal information for each place, cited individually in the guide, as of September 2026.
- Legal situation per federal state summarised from orecast.app/en/legal, as of August 2026. Not legal advice.
- Opening times, fees and seasons change, so each place lists its operator's website in the guide.