Binz, Germany

BINZ, or Ostseebad Binz to give the most celebrated of the island's former bathing resorts its full title, is Rügen's holiday capital. If tourist mini-trains, cafés and boutiques and all the adjuncts of a resort are not to your taste, this is not your place in peak season. High-rise it is not, however. Friendly and approachable, Binz is instead characterized by the Bäderarchitektur of its time as a fashionable sea-water bathing resort. Central shady streets are lined with the handsome villas of German high society, adorned with carved verandas and wrought iron, all splashed with a uniform coat of white paint. The effect is pure holiday architecture – light-hearted rather than ostentatious. Now as then, the heart of the seafront promenade is the palatial Kurhaus where nineteenth-century bathers sipped spa waters, now a five-star hotel. At its shoulder, at the end of main drag Hauptstrasse, is the requisite pier, which rises above 5km of fine white sands: 4km north of the pier and 1km to the south in a smarter area of town, all scattered with wicker Strandkörbe seats. Among a number of tracks that ascend from the beach into surrounding woods is one that follows the shore.

In the 1830s, four decades before sea-water bathers wetted an ankle, island aristocrat Prince Wilhelm Malte I rebuilt his hunting cabin on Tempelberg hill south of the village to create Jagdschloss Granitz (May– Sept daily 9am–6pm; Oct– April Tues– Sun 10am–4pm; € 3.50). The centrepiece of the dusty-pink neo-Gothic castle is a 38m tower designed a decade later by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose viewing platform permits good views. The story goes that Malte only requested the tower to settle a dispute over island property rights – the Swedes finally agreed to his terms that he could keep whatever he could see from his lodge. Located around 2km south of Binz, the lodge is most easily accessed on the Jagdschloss-Express minitrain (€ 7.50 return) that runs through central Binz to the entrance every 45 minutes. The Rasender Roland steam train and car park leave you fifteen minutes' walk uphill to the castle.