The Case for Germany

The Most Underrated Major Travel Destination in Western Europe

Germany is systematically underestimated as a travel destination — ranked below France, Italy, and Spain in most traveler priority lists despite offering cultural depth, historical complexity, and a quality of urban experience that rivals any of them. Berlin is one of the great cities of the 21st century: raw, creative, historically dense, and operating at an energy level that no other European capital quite matches. Munich is one of the most livable cities in Europe, with world-class museums, an extraordinary food and beer culture, and the Alps an hour to the south. The Rhine Valley between Koblenz and Bingen contains the most concentrated run of medieval castles in Europe, rising above vineyards that produce some of Germany's finest Rieslings. The country's Christmas markets are the finest in the world and transform every major city from late November through December into a specific seasonal experience unavailable anywhere else.

Germany also has the most extensive and most reliable rail network in Europe. Every destination in this itinerary connects by direct train, and the ICE high-speed service makes Berlin to Munich a four-hour journey rather than a flight. Booking through bahn.com at least two weeks ahead yields Sparpreis fares that make the rail option significantly cheaper than flying when airport time is factored in.

Days 1–4

Berlin

Berlin is the city that most consistently surprises visitors who arrive with expectations set by Western European capitals and find something fundamentally different. The reunification of 1990 left a city with two of everything — two opera houses, two zoos, two city centers — and with vast areas of former no-man's-land between the wall that have been filled in the decades since with art galleries, clubs, street food markets, and architecture of extraordinary ambition and variety. The result is a city that feels unfinished in the best possible sense: still being invented, still making itself, more concerned with what it might become than with managing what it already is.

Museum Island — the northern tip of the Spree island in central Berlin, containing five world-class museums within walking distance of each other — is UNESCO World Heritage listed and one of the finest concentrations of cultural institutions in Europe. The Pergamon Museum holds the reconstructed Pergamon Altar (a 2nd-century BC Greek temple transported stone by stone from Turkey), the Ishtar Gate of Babylon, and the Market Gate of Miletus — three of the most significant pieces of ancient architecture in the world, none of which can be seen at their original locations. The Neues Museum holds the bust of Nefertiti, one of the most recognized works of ancient art in existence. The Alte Nationalgalerie covers 19th-century European painting with particular strength in Caspar David Friedrich and the German Romantic tradition. Book tickets for all at smb.museum — the combined day pass covers all five museums.

The Brandenburg Gate — the 18th-century neoclassical triumphal arch that stood in the no-man's-land between East and West Berlin for 28 years — is Berlin's most significant monument and the correct orientation point for understanding the city's divided history. The East Side Gallery, a 1.3-kilometer stretch of the former Wall painted by artists from around the world in 1990, is the longest remaining section and the most vivid single document of the Wall's fall available in any Berlin neighborhood.

The Holocaust Memorial — Peter Eisenman's 2,711 concrete stelae of varying heights covering 19,000 square meters south of the Brandenburg Gate — is one of the most significant and most discussed works of public art of the 21st century. Walking through it produces a specific physical disorientation as the ground slopes and the stelae rise above head height on all sides, the surrounding city disappearing. The underground Information Centre beneath the memorial is essential context. Allow 90 minutes for both.

Kreuzberg — the former West Berlin neighborhood that developed its distinct counter-cultural identity precisely because it backed up against the Wall — is now Berlin's most diverse and most culinarily interesting district. The Turkish Market on the Maybachufer canal (Tuesday and Friday, noon to 6pm) is the finest outdoor market in Berlin: Turkish and Middle Eastern produce, textiles, spices, and street food reflecting the neighborhood's significant Turkish population. The Markthalle Neun in Eisenbahnstrasse (Thursday Food Market from 5pm) is Berlin's finest covered food market, with the city's best independent food producers and street food vendors concentrated in a 19th-century market hall.

Days 5–6

The Rhine Valley

The Middle Rhine Valley between Koblenz and Bingen — a 65-kilometer stretch of river gorge flanked by steep vineyard slopes and punctuated by medieval castles — is UNESCO World Heritage listed and one of the most specifically German landscapes in Europe. The combination of the river, the castles, and the Riesling vineyards that cover every south-facing slope produces a visual experience that has attracted travelers since the Romantic era, when Turner, Byron, and Victor Hugo all found material here. It is best experienced by river — the KD Rhine cruise between Koblenz and Bingen takes approximately four hours downstream and covers most of the significant castle viewpoints from the water — and based from the small town of Bacharach, which is the most picturesque of the Rhine valley villages and has good accommodation at sensible prices.

Bacharach itself — a small walled town of half-timbered houses, a Gothic church ruin visible above the rooftops, and a main street of wine bars and Weinstuben — rewards an evening of exploration before any castle or river visit. The Spitz restaurant on the market square has excellent local Riesling by the glass from the surrounding Bacharacher Hahn and Posten vineyards. The wines of the Middle Rhine — leaner and more mineral than the Mosel's, more aromatic than the Rheingau's — are rarely exported at the quality available here and represent one of Germany's wine travel arguments.

Burg Rheinfels above St. Goar, a 20-minute train journey from Bacharach, is the largest castle ruin on the Rhine and the most rewarding to explore — a vast complex of towers, dungeons, and subterranean passages that resisted Prussian siege for decades before being destroyed by retreating French forces in 1797. The Lorelei rock — the 132-meter slate cliff above St. Goarshausen where, according to the Romantic legend, a siren lured sailors to their deaths on the rocks below — is the Rhine Valley's most famous landmark and most visible from the river.

Days 7–10

Munich & Bavaria

Munich is Germany at its most confident and most comfortable — a city of 1.5 million people that functions with an efficiency and a quality of life that consistently places it among the world's most livable cities, and that takes its food, its beer, and its culture with a seriousness that produces results of genuine excellence. The Deutsches Museum is the largest science and technology museum in the world. The Pinakothek museums hold one of Europe's finest art collections. The English Garden is larger than New York's Central Park and more genuinely used by its citizens. And the beer hall culture — the specific combination of long wooden tables, a liter of Bavarian lager, and the social permission to talk to strangers that the format creates — is one of the most enjoyable social institutions available to any traveler in Europe.

The Marienplatz — Munich's central square, dominated by the neo-Gothic Neues Rathaus with its Glockenspiel that performs daily at 11am and noon — is the correct starting point for Munich. The daily market of the Viktualienmarkt adjacent to it, operating since 1807, is Munich's finest food market and the correct place for breakfast: the cheese stalls, the butchers with Weisswurst and Leberkäse, the bread from the Bavarian bakeries, and the small beer garden at the market's center where you can drink a Radler at 10am without social judgment.

The Alte Pinakothek holds one of the world's finest collections of Old Master paintings — Rubens, Dürer, Raphael, Titian, Bruegel — in a neoclassical building that was specifically designed to display them. The Neue Pinakothek and Pinakothek der Moderne complete a trilogy of adjacent museums covering 19th-century and contemporary art respectively. The Deutsches Museum on the Museumsinsel in the Isar — two floors of virtually every significant technology in human history, from mining equipment to aircraft to nuclear physics demonstrations — can absorb a full day and is the finest science museum in Europe.

The Hofbräuhaus — the most famous beer hall in the world, founded in 1589 as the royal court brewery — is tourist-facing and genuinely extraordinary simultaneously. The ground-floor main hall, with its barrel-vaulted ceiling, long tables, and oompah band, is an experience of specifically Bavarian social life that has no equivalent anywhere in Germany. Order a Masskrug (one-liter stein) of Hofbräu Original, share a table with strangers, and stay longer than feels efficient.

Neuschwanstein — King Ludwig II's fairy-tale castle in the Alps above Füssen, 90 minutes by train from Munich — is the most visited castle in Germany and the inspiration for Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty Castle. The interior tour (book in advance at neuschwanstein.de — tickets sell out on peak season days) covers the throne room, the singers' hall, and the artificial grotto that Ludwig had installed in his private apartments. The best view of the castle is from the Marienbrücke bridge above the Pöllat gorge behind it — a 15-minute walk from the castle entrance that produces the classic postcard angle across the gorge.

The Zugspitze — Germany's highest mountain at 2,962 meters — is accessible by cogwheel train and cable car from Garmisch-Partenkirchen (90 minutes from Munich by rail) and provides a panorama over the Bavarian Alps and into Austria and Italy on clear days. The summit has a year-round ski area, a glacier, and the specific quality of Alpine light at altitude that the Munich plain below cannot produce. A day in the Alps — whether at Neuschwanstein, the Zugspitze, or simply walking the footpaths around the Königssee lake near Berchtesgaden — gives the Bavaria section its full context.

The Bottom Line

Ten days covering Berlin, the Rhine Valley, and Munich gives you the full range of what Germany actually is — the historically raw, creatively alive capital; the romantic river landscape that produced German Romanticism; and the confident, comfortable southern capital with its beer halls and its Alpine backdrop. It is the European trip that most consistently produces the response: why have I not been here before? The answer is usually that France and Italy got there first. Germany is worth the reordering.