Lüneburg Heath and Wilseder Berg Flow + Hamburg · Wendland, Göhrde Forest and Elbe Heights

Scenic road chapters

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Hamburg

   Hamburg opens up to the water. The Elbe runs through the city, the port covers a large chunk of it, and the harbour front is a long working landscape of cranes, container ships, tugs and ferries, with the sound of horns carrying across the water at night. The old warehouse district, the Speicherstadt, is a block of red-brick buildings on oak piles, built in the 1880s and now partly part of a UNESCO listing, with canals running between them and gabled facades reflecting in the water. Next to it, the HafenCity is a modern district whose centrepiece is the Elbphilharmonie, a concert hall in the shape of a glass wave on top of an old warehouse, opened in 2017 after many delays and a scandalous overrun in costs.

   Read the complete Hamburg write-up.

2. 2. Lüneburg

   Salt made Lüneburg, and the town looks as though it knows it. For more than a thousand years the brine springs under the old town were boiled down into white gold, which was carted to Lübeck and shipped across the Baltic to preserve herring, and the profits built a city of tall brick gables, grand merchant houses and a town hall that grew by accretion across six centuries.

   Read the complete Lüneburg write-up.

3. 3. Groß Twülpstedt

4. 4. Sangerhausen

5. 5. Neustadt an der Orla

6. 6. Berg

7. 7. Leutenberg

8. 8. Sondershausen

9. 9. Elbe

   Despite the name, there is no great river here. This Elbe is a village in the rolling farmland of southeastern Lower Saxony, between Salzgitter and Hildesheim, and the river that shares its name flows more than a hundred kilometres to the east. It is a quiet place of brick farmhouses, a church, fields of sugar beet, wheat and rapeseed, and gentle hills, close to the small towns of Baddeckenstedt and Holle in the valley of the Innerste.

   Read the complete Elbe write-up.

10. 10. Hermannsburg

    In the middle of the nineteenth century, a pastor named Ludwig Harms founded a missionary seminary in Hermannsburg, a small village in the Lüneburg Heath, and sent farmers and craftsmen as missionaries to Africa and beyond. Their influence spread far further than anyone could have expected: there is a Hermannsburg in South Africa, and another in the Australian outback, founded by Lutheran missionaries from here. The mission still exists, and the village has kept a quiet, slightly pious charm, with half-timbered farmhouses and old oak trees.

    Read the complete Hermannsburg write-up.

11. 11. Hamburg

    Return visit. Read the place description above.

    Read the complete Hamburg write-up.