Germany

Germany walks from north to south through almost every landscape of western Europe. The north is water: the Wadden Sea with its tidal flats, the Baltic coast with its cliffs, and the river mouths behind them. Above that sit the Mittelgebirge, low forested ridges like the Rothaargebirge, the Thuringian Forest and the Sauerland, threaded by centuries-old trade paths. The south ends high: the Bavarian Alps with limestone walls and green valleys. Between those extremes lie river valleys like the Rhine, the Elbe and the Weser, and forests that have been planted, felled and returned to nature for centuries. The Rennsteig runs along the ridge of the Thuringian Forest and appears in the records from 1330; with around a hundred thousand walkers a year it is still the busiest trail of its kind in the country, past hundreds of old boundary stones from the age of small principalities. In Saxon Switzerland the Malerweg follows the rocks where the painters of the Romantic era found their subject, Caspar David Friedrich among them. The Schluchtensteig strings seven gorges together across the southern Black Forest, and the Wildnis-Trail crosses a national park in the Eifel that is slowly returning a former military training ground to the wild. The logistics are German: tightly waymarked, village to village, and every day ends with a meal and a bed.