This week’s dream: Germany’s extraordinary “forgotten islands”

The Halligen are often described as Germany’s “forgotten islands”, says Dixe Wills in The Guardian. And it’s true that few people have heard of them. Sprinkled off the northwest coast close to the Danish border, they are “extremely low-lying”, so much so that they are inundated each winter when high tides – known as land unter – flood the “pancake-flat salt marsh”. The islanders are prepared for this annual event: each house is “built on a warft, a man-made mound that (usually) keeps it safely above the waterline”. When the flood comes, each mound “becomes its own island, a tiny outpost in the foaming brine”.

With vast horizons in every direction, “huge bird-filled skies and odd little hillocks – each a hamlet unto itself” – the Halligen Islands are like nowhere else you’ve ever been. They are resolutely old-fashioned and their pace of life is “blissfully unhurried”. Hooge is the archipelago’s “bustling metropolis”, home to about 100 people. There’s a grocer’s shop, two “tiny” museums, a few restaurants and “the world’s only Sturmflutkino (Storm Flood Cinema)”. There are almost no motor vehicles, but you can hire bikes to explore the island, or catch a ferry to one of its neighbours.

Each spring and autumn the islands are “awash with migrating birds”, and guides are on hand to help visitors identify them – as well as the native wildlife, which includes salt-marsh flowers unique to the islands, such as the purple halligflieder and yellow strand-salzmelde. At low tide, you can take guided walks on the vast mudflats, where tiny snails dwell in their millions. This “ephemeral desert”, a uniquely precious habitat, is facing an “uncertain” future thanks to rising sea levels. Several of the uninhabited Halligen “have already vanished beneath the waves”. A train from London to Husum costs from £342 return with SNCF (www.voyages-sncf.com). Hus Waterkant (blauerpesel.de) in Hooge has doubles from s62 b&b.