Activities and community volunteering projects for everyone
Activities in the park
Activities are regularly organised in the park for all ages. You can go to the calendar to discover what’s planned in the coming weeks.
Note: animations and activities are held exclusively in French.
Community volunteering projects
Do you wish to contribute to ecological restoration and biodiversity protection in the park? Community volunteering projects are regularly organised thanks to a partnership between the City of Lille and the non-profit ‘Les Blongios’ on many restoration actions.
- If you are a private individual, you can join a project by looking up the program on the Blongios’ website: https://www.lesblongios.fr/
Note: the non-profit is a French-speaking organisation. Don’t hesitate to contact them via email to see if you would be able to join while speaking English! - If you are a business manager or in charge of a team, you can also contact us to organise volunteering projects with your team: parcdelacitadelle@mairie-lille.fr
One outcome of the community volunteering projects: riverbanks restoration
The park’s riverbanks are fragile ecosystems: with slopes sometimes too steep for biodiversity, as well as strollers, joggers or dogs contributing to soil erosion, the result is often damaging to biodiversity. The City decided to restore those banks, which means to green them and make them livable for fauna and flora alike.
Gentle slope riverbanks
The slopes of the riverbanks around the park have been reworked to be gentler. This allows for the previously sterile or deteriorated environments to become more welcoming for wetland flora. This gentler elevation gain is also more welcoming for a great variety of species such as toads and frogs. By limiting or even stopping soil erosion, this work contributes to the ecological quality of the environments.
In some areas, this work was accompanied by the installation of wooden fences to protect the banks and allow for the development of some species of flowers such as the meadowseet, the purple loosestrife or the yellow iris. Large boulders have also been placed in the slopes to allow for an occasional access to water for fishermen or dogs.
Committed volunteers
Other projects have been organised in different areas of the park: willow trees have been planted, wetlands and ponds have been created, sanctuaries and shelters have been installed for coots and grebes, and nesting sites have been created for kingfishers and swallows.
The volunteering projects are generally conducted by fifteen volunteers of all ages, led by professionnals in the non-profit sector or within the City personnel. Some projects have brought together more than 80 volunteers.
Watercress and frogs
The result is clear: more than 20% of the 20kms of riverbanks have been greened and reworked. On some of them, stinging nettle and thistle have left in favour of many different wetland plants, some of which had previously disappeared from the park and the city in general (such as the marsh spike-rush or the onerow yellowcress).
In the now-protected zones, the green frogs are now protected from disturbance. Some twenty coots are now nesting in the riverbanks as well as kingfishers (4 were spotted in 2022).
The fish swim amongst the willow tree roots, and some species of bees which nest underground have found a new habitat.
Article written by Valérie Pfahl.
