Müritz

Müritz is the flagship of East Germany's deathbed gift to conservation: in September 1990, in its last weeks of existence, the GDR pushed through a national park programme that set aside great tracts of the Mecklenburg Lake Plateau, and the Müritz National Park — largest terrestrial national park in Germany at 322 square kilometres — took effect days before reunification. It protects not the great lake itself so much as the country east of it: pine and beech forest, more than a hundred lakes, kettle bogs, and reedbeds on the Müritz's roadless eastern shore, much of it former state hunting ground and military terrain that ordinary people could not enter for decades.

The park has two parts. The larger Müritz section runs from Waren east past Boek and Federow — osprey country above all, with the fish hawks nesting on power poles within scope view of the Federow information point, and white-tailed eagles breeding at densities unmatched in western Europe. The separate Serrahn section to the east is different in kind: a hill country of old beech around quiet kettle-hole lakes, part of the UNESCO ancient-beech listing since 2011. Between them, unnoticed by most visitors, the Havel — Berlin's river — rises in the park's bogs and slips away southward as a stream you can step across.

Autumn is the park's great theatre: tens of thousands of cranes stage on the surrounding fields and fly in at dusk to roost in the shallow lakes, the Rederangsee fly-in being one of the standard pilgrimages of German birdwatching.

What's worth knowing before you go

Waren (Müritz), on the Berlin–Rostock line, is the gateway; inside the park a seasonal Nationalpark-Ticket bus loops the villages, and the flat sandy tracks make this the best cycling park in Germany — most visitors do it by bike, and canoeists thread the Upper Havel chain from Kratzeburg. Serrahn is reached from Neustrelitz via Carpin; its beech quiet is the antidote to the busier lakeshore.

Book a guided evening stand at the Rederangsee for the crane roost in late September or early October — the fly-in at last light, thousands of birds bugling down onto black water, is worth planning a trip around. The connoisseur's detail: the Käflingsberg fire tower near Boek gives the only overview of how much water this landscape actually hides.