Eifel

The Eifel became North Rhine-Westphalia's first and only national park in 2004, taking over a block of wooded upland between Monschau and the Rur valley where history had accidentally done conservation's work. The Dreiborn plateau at its heart was a military training ground until 2005 — Belgian tanks kept it treeless, and it is now a rare expanse of open wild grassland — while above the Urftsee looms Vogelsang, the hulking "Ordensburg" the Nazis built to train their party elite. The complex now houses the park centre and a documentation site, one of Germany's more deliberate conversions of a poisoned place into a public one.

The park's long game is forest: the Kermeter ridge already carries old beech, and the plantation spruce elsewhere is being unpicked so the beech can take back the acid slopes. Through it all wind the drowned valleys of the Rur and Urft reservoirs, fjord-like below the woods, and along the south-western edge the Perlenbach and Fuhrtsbach valleys flood yellow with wild daffodils every April — one of the last mass blooms in Germany. Wildcats live here at some of their best German densities, black storks have returned, and red deer bugle over Dreiborn in autumn.

The Eifel was also Germany's first certified International Dark Sky Park: on a moonless night the Milky Way stands plainly over the plateau, an hour from Cologne's glow.

What's worth knowing before you go

Gemünd and Heimbach are the natural bases — Heimbach has the prettier arrival, by the little Rurtalbahn railway from Düren — with park gateways at Rurberg and Einruhr reached by bus. The set-piece walk is the Wilder Weg boardwalk in the Kermeter; the serious undertaking is the four-day, 85-kilometre Wildnis-Trail across the whole park.

Time an April visit for the daffodil valleys near Höfen and go early on a weekday — the bloom draws crowds. The connoisseur's booking is a new-moon night at Vogelsang's astronomy platform, where the park's rangers run star walks.