[Lifestyle] Europe’s best walking cities: Seven wonders of the wandering world

[THē-GHōST]

 

From atmospheric Berlin to Joyce’s Trieste, via Marseille’s markets and a wellbeing walk in Copenhagen, city strolls reward the curious rambler he art of flâneur-ing might be French and its most famous practitioners Parisians, but other European cultures have walking traditions, from the Italian passeggiata and Spanish paseo – social promenades to take the air as dusk falls – to German wanderlust: hiking with desire. Nothing opens up a city like a long ramble on foot. It’s the only way to make a place your own and unearth discoveries not listed in guidebooks or apps. 

 

For all that it is mainstream, even fashionable, and was a favourite with no-frills flying weekenders before the pandemic, Berlin remains a strange, sometimes alienating city. This is especially the case when you go walking around its historic heart, where the Berlin Wall stood from 1961 to 1989. While unified Germany has thrown many millions at the city and tried to fill this former site of espionage, tension and trauma with newbuilds and showy upgrades, such as Norman Foster’s glass dome for the Reichstag, swathes of the area remain open to the sky. This accentuates a feeling of emptiness in what is a relatively unpopulous capital city – 3.6 million, around a third of London – and also allows the mental space to conjure Berlin’s many ghosts. Vague, unplanned walks around the former East and West will still evince differences – the tank-friendly width of Karl-Marx-Allee, the glitzy shops along the Kurfürstendamm – but if you want to chart a route, I’d recommend a wander taking in the following: the Hansa Quarter (Hansaviertel), a showcase estate where renowned architects (including Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Arne Jacobsen and Oscar Niemeyer) designed modernist residential buildings at a site destroyed in the second world war; the Tiergarten inner-city park; Alexanderplatz, which still exudes something of the old East; and Prenzlauer Berg, where there are nice coffee shops and lunch spots. Berlin is big, but you can always hop on an S-bahn train for the return journey. If you fancy a hike outside the central districts, wander down to former Tempelhof airport, where the narratives of Nazi Germany, the Berlin airlift and modern migration crisscross like contrails.

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2021/oct/07/europes-best-walking-cities-berlin-marseille-copenhagen-seven-wonders-of-the-wandering-world