Kühlungsborn is really three villages that were married in 1938 and given a name that sounds like a spa. Brunshaupten, Arendsee and Fulgen had all been fishing hamlets and then bathing resorts, and today the merged town runs along the Baltic for some three kilometres, with a long promenade, a sea bridge that reaches out over the water, and a line of white villas in the old resort style with carved balconies and little towers.
That style has a reason. The grand duke of Mecklenburg made the coast fashionable in the nineteenth century, starting a few kilometres east at Heiligendamm, the so-called white town, and the lesser seaside towns followed. Between Kühlungsborn and Bad Doberan runs the narrow-gauge steam railway everyone calls Molli, which has puffed along since the 1880s and still arrives with a whistle and plenty of coal smoke. If you hear a whistle while you are parked, that is the explanation.
The beach road is a gentle affair, not a challenge. You come down off the low Kühlung hills, which are only about a hundred and thirty metres high but feel substantial against the flat coast, and run along the waterfront at promenade speed with the Baltic on one side. The sand is fine and pale, the water is shallow and brisk, and even in August you will want a moment before going in. The sea here is almost tideless and only mildly salty, one of the reasons the brackish water feels softer than the North Sea. On a clear evening the sun slips into the water to the north-west, which is fair compensation for the cold.
Practical things are easy because the place lives for visitors. There are petrol stations and shops near the main roads, ice cream and fish rolls along the front, and plenty of cafés where you can sit with a coffee and watch cyclists. Weekends in July and August are packed, parking is tight and the promenade is a place for strolling, not riding, so pick a weekday morning if you can. Spring and autumn, when the beech woods behind the town turn green or copper, are the best times for the road.