easy hiking trails in Europe
St Pauli is the oldest of Hamburg’s Szeneviertels, although you would not have called it a “trendy neighbourhood” when people began to settle here in the late Middle Ages. St Pauli started its life as Hamburg’s messy attic: everything that the municipal administration did not want inside the city walls but, for various reasons, did…
In Germany, more even than in other European countries, the most interesting parts of major cities can be located in the “trendy neighbourhoods”, the Szeneviertel as the Germans call them – a term which, perhaps inadvertently, references the world of the theatre. Inadvertently or not, however, the analogy feels appropriate because these quarters appear to…
If you travel a lot in Europe, there is a good chance that you will, sooner or later, pass through EuroAirport. This airport – which is located near prime hiking areas such as Lake Constance and the Black Forest and used a lot by low-cost airlines including Wizz and Easyjet – is the only airport…
Bordeaux, the unofficial wine capital of the world, may have given its name to the most famous appellation in the world, but on the vinicultural map of the region, its territory is represented by a lone blank spot: Bordeaux is virtually the only place within the Gironde département where no commercial vineyards operate, and it…
Bordeaux in the sunny southwest of France is the unofficial wine capital of the world. The label of “Bordeaux”, however, under which the locally produced wines are distributed across the world and which has earned the city its fame, only serves to indicate the name of the place where these wines have been stored, blended…
Lake Constance – located on the Austro-German-Swiss triangle of borders – is one of central Europe’s great tourist attractions, but it is not perfectly suited for everybody’s taste. My personal problem with Lake Constance concerns its sheer size: should not a lake represent the idea of a confined space, with clearly discernible shorelines wherever you…
Some cities leave you a choice of where to go for an easy hike. You can pick between a walk alongside a lake or a river, a stroll through the gardens of an ancient castle and a journey to a beauty spot up a hill. But not all cities are quite so generous. Some cities,…
Tübingen is Germany’s two-and-a-half river city but any resemblance to Pittsburgh stops right there. There are no steel furnaces in two-and-a-half rivers Tübingen, no ketchup factories (labeled H. J. Heinz or otherwise) and no world-famous sports clubs – Tübingen’s soccer team plays all the way down in Germany’s sixth tier. Instead, you will get plenty…
No account of Orta would be complete without a piece on its most eye-catching feature: the island of San Giulio that sits a few hundred meters away from the town in the middle of the lake, mounted like a precious stone on a shimmering expanse of blue. Generally speaking, it is a good idea to…
Knights, peasants and mendicant friars who, 1000 years ago, journeyed throughout Europe in search of a direct encounter with God have written one of the most fascinating chapters of medieval history. The age of pilgrimages can be separated into three distinct periods: the earliest pilgrims sought out the shrines of saints in the hope that…