Unteres Odertal
Germany's only floodplain national park — Oder polders flooded by design every winter, wild geese in the tens of thousands, Poland on the far dike.
Unteres Odertal, declared in 1995, is the only national park in Germany built around a river's floodplain — and, characteristically for the Oder, it is a managed wildness. Early in the twentieth century the lower valley between Hohensaaten and the edge of Szczecin was engineered Dutch-fashion into polders; the park inherited that plumbing and runs it for nature: each winter the gates of the wet polders are opened and the Oder spreads across the meadows in a sheet of shallow water kilometres wide, drawn down again in spring for the breeding season and summer hay. The result is a calendar landscape — waterworld in January, wader meadow in May, corncrake grass in July.
The winter flood is the spectacle. Tens of thousands of geese and whooper swans raft on the drowned polders, white-tailed eagles patrol the ice edges, and the dawn lift-off can empty kilometres of water into the sky at once. Spring brings pike spawning in the flooded grass and the rasping of corncrakes at night; this valley was also the aquatic warbler's last regular German breeding ground, a distinction the park wears in past tense as the species collapsed rangewide. Beavers engineer every backwater, and otters do well in a park that is one-half water by disposition.
It is a border park in the full sense: the far dike is Poland, whose Lower Oder Valley landscape park mirrors the German side, the two marketed together as an "Internationalpark". The German bank rises in a wooded valley rim with the best views — and at Criewen, a Lenné-designed manor park incongruously hosts the national park house.
What's worth knowing before you go
Schwedt/Oder is the gateway, with direct regional trains from Berlin; Criewen lies a short bus or bike ride south, and the flat dike-top cycling — the Oder-Neiße route runs through — is the natural way to cover a long, thin park. Viewpoints at Stützkow and Gartz command the polders; bring optics, since everything here happens at wetland distances.
Come in late November through February for the goose-and-swan flood (dress for Brandenburg wind off open water), or in June for midnight corncrakes and nightingale thickets. The connoisseur's vantage is the Stützkow tower at first light on a hard-frost morning, when the lift-off happens against pink ice-fog with Poland silhouetted behind.