Harz

The Harz is two parks that became one: East Germany's Hochharz (1990) and Lower Saxony's Harz (1994) merged in 2006 into Germany's first national park spanning a former Cold War border — fittingly, since the border ran straight over its summit. The Brocken, at 1,141 metres northern Germany's highest point, spent the division fenced inside the death strip, crowned with Soviet and Stasi listening domes; on 3 December 1989, weeks after the Wall fell, thousands of hikers simply walked up and took it back. The concrete relics now house the summit museum, and the mountain has returned to its older employments — Goethe climbed it in 1777, and Walpurgisnacht witch-lore made it Faust's Blocksberg.

It remains a genuinely fierce hill: fog three hundred days a year, arctic gusts, and a natural treeline dwarf-spruce zone found nowhere else so far north in Germany's uplands. Below it, the park is mid-transformation on a scale that shocks first-time visitors — drought and bark beetle since 2018 have killed the planted spruce across whole valleys, and the park, like the Bavarian Forest before it, is letting the dead stand while rowan and birch and self-sown spruce come up through the grey. Granite tor fields, raised bogs, and the 18th-century mining ponds of the Upper Harz water system stitch the plateaus together, and the lynx is back — reintroduced here from 2000, the first successful return in Germany, spreading outward from the Harz ever since.

The Brockenbahn is the theatrical way up: metre-gauge steam from Wernigerode, climbing through the forest transformation zone to the bare summit.

What's worth knowing before you go

Wernigerode, Bad Harzburg, and Ilsenburg ring the park with rail connections; Torfhaus is the classic walking trailhead, with the Goetheweg to the Brocken summit the park's most-trodden line. Quieter and finer is the Heinrich-Heine-Weg up the Ilse valley from Ilsenburg. Check the summit webcam before committing — a clear Brocken day is a minority outcome, and rime ice runs well into spring.

The connoisseur's ticket is the first morning steam departure in deep winter, when the train grinds through frost-silvered dead stands into summit fog — the Waldwandel, the forest turning over, seen at its most operatic.