Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania

Travel southward from the sea and the land begins to loosen. Fields give way to the Mecklenburg Lake District, where glacial lakes lie in long chains between birch and pine, and the light on the water seems to come from underneath. The lakes are quiet in a practised way: villages keep their boat slips tidy, and the paths along the shore are walked by people who know exactly where the reeds thin out. Further north the character hardens. The dunes of the coast are held down with marram grass, the villages have low thatched roofs pressed close against the wind, and the forests come down almost to the tide line. In the east, the Pomeranian strip around Usedom feels more open and more self-consciously seaside, with long wooden piers and wide sand, while the west, around the Darß peninsula, feels older and more reticent.

The towns carry the region's history in brick. Schwerin sits on its lakes with a castle whose towers seem to float on the water, and its streets reward slow walking. Stralsund has the stepped gables of Hanseatic merchants, dark red against a sky that is often silver, and a harbour where the old trading ships once tied up. Wismar is quieter, its market square lined with façades that have outlasted several centuries of trade. Each of these places has a particular smell at midday: bread from a bakery, diesel from a fishing cutter, cut grass from a garden wall. On the coast, a day means walking the chalk path at Jasmund until the trees thin and the sea opens below, or cycling the flat roads of Usedom with the wind at your back and the Baltic appearing and disappearing between the dunes. Hiddensee offers a different pace altogether, with no cars and sand roads that bend around old fishermen's cottages.

What stays with a visitor is the sense that the land has not been arranged for them. The lakes, the beech woods, the brick towns and the grey-green sea all carry on with their own work, and a traveller is simply allowed to join in for a while. It is easy to imagine leaving, and harder to imagine not wanting to return: to see the lakes freeze at their edges, the coast blow clear after a storm, the gables reflected in a harbour that has not changed much in generations. The region asks for little except attention, and it repays that attention slowly, one wide view at a time.