Sellin is Rügen's showpiece for the kind of seaside holiday that Germans were taking before the First World War: long white villas with wooden balconies and turrets, set on a bluff above a beach of fine pale sand. The architecture is called Bäderarchitektur, spa architecture, and Sellin has some of the best surviving examples on the Baltic. The grand hotels and villas run in a line along the cliff top, painted white and decorated with fretwork like icing, and the whole thing looks like a film set, only with real tourists in real deckchairs.
The most famous feature is the pier. The Seebrücke, a long wooden jetty that stretches out into the Baltic, has a restaurant at the end and a design that recalls the earlier pier, which was burned down in the twentieth century and rebuilt. A long flight of steps and a lift connect the beach and the promenade, because the bluff is steep. In the surrounding forest, the Jagdschloss Granitz, a hunting lodge built for the Prince of Putbus in the nineteenth century, stands on a hill with a central tower that you climb by an iron spiral staircase. The views from the top, over the forest and the sea, are worth the climb.
For riders, the roads around Sellin are quiet and leafy. The route from Putbus through the Granitz forest has a handful of gentle bends beneath tall beech trees, and the surface is good. The Baltic is never far, and between villages you find fields of rape in spring, bright yellow against a pale sky. Traffic can be thick in high summer, particularly on the coastal road toward Binz, but the island is flat, so you can pick your moment. On some days the sea wind makes the bike feel lively, and a crosswind on an open stretch deserves respect.
Sellin has enough shops and cafés for a lunch stop but is small, so for fuel it is better to go to Binz, about six kilometres to the north, which has a bigger range of services. The beach is a short walk from the centre. There is a smoked fish stand or two, and in the evening the restaurants serve fresh catch.
A visit out of season is quieter and more atmospheric, with grey waves, empty promenades and a mood close to melancholy.