The Hof Ter Saksen estate is a public educational nature park with hiking trails, on the border of Beveren and Haasdonk . The 27-hectare domain has been owned by the municipality of Beveren since 1982 . The estate consists of meadows, fields, a wooded area, an arboretum and a castle park. The castle park has a castle , a farm and an orangery . The rear of the castle tower is 36 meters high, as high as the St. James Church of Haasdonk . The castle is built according to the Neoclassical architectureand shows similarities with monuments by the French architects Ange-Jacques Gabriel and François-Joseph Bélanger .

Places of interest

The farm 

The farm with built-in stables, built in 1812 . It was called ‘Ter Hoeve’ by the last owners. The municipality has recently (2007) restored the building and the inner courtyard is open to the public. The building itself is used as a storage place by the green department.

The orangery

Built in 1812 by order of Jan-Baptist Vermessen. This building used to serve as a cold greenhouse for the exotic plants, which were thus protected from the freezing cold. There would have been thousands of species of plants in the orangery . Since the restoration of the domain in 2007, the orangery has been used as a café.

Ice cellars 

A little further on the estate are underground cellars . These cellars are in brick and closed by wooden doors. In the past, pieces of ice with fish were cut loose from the pond around the castle in winter and stored here. Around 1987, debris was cleared from the ice cellars and it was discovered that bats had made it their shelter. Today they still hibernate here.