Müritz
Accommodation in Müritz
On the eastern shore of the Müritz, a water-shaped landscape meets vast forests and moors. The Müritz National Park includes a protected area around the Müritz, Germany’s largest lake. If you’d like to plan your stay around nature experiences, you’ll find a variety of ways to explore here: exhibitions and ranger tips, viewpoints, signposted trails and opportunities to experience the lake landscape.
Water, moors and forests
The eastern shore of the Müritz is an extremely gently sloping outwash plain formed during the last major glaciation. Vast reed beds, moors and swamp forests define the character of this stretch of shoreline; the water level there fluctuates considerably with the seasons. The Müritz National Park as a whole also has a varied landscape: forests and moors are joined by lakes and wide meadows. This makes observing nature and experiencing the landscape natural focuses for a trip.
The national park provides protected habitats for many endangered animal and plant species. The animal species mentioned include cranes, ospreys, white-tailed eagles and red deer. Crane watching is especially popular in autumn; ospreys and white-tailed eagles are also spotted in the national park.
Views and finding your way around the national park
Two different viewpoints offer a good overview of the landscape. From Käflingsberg Tower, you can see across the entire Müritz section of the national park. The observation tower at Großer Serrahnsee offers views of the lake and the surrounding forest landscape. The two viewpoints offer different perspectives: one looks across the Müritz section of the protected area, while the other takes in the lake and its forest setting.
The national park information centres combine exhibitions about nature and the landscape with personal tips and recommendations from rangers on worthwhile tours and places to observe wildlife. Together with nature trails, ranger-led tours and information centres, they offer insights into flora and fauna. You can choose your focus depending on whether you’d like to learn more first, follow a recommended tour, or experience nature and the landscape in your own way.
Explore on foot, by bike or on the water
More than 600 kilometres of signposted hiking and cycling trails run through the unspoilt nature of the Müritz National Park. One specific option on the eastern shore is the “Blauer Radfahrer” circular route between Boek and Schwarzenhof, which lets you experience the landscape there by bike. If you’d like to explore the forest landscape around Serrahn on foot, you can take the forest discovery trail from Zinow to Dianenhof. It leads through the area of ancient, primeval beech forests that were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2011.
The lakes also offer a special way to experience nature: environmentally friendly boat and canoe trips are permitted on many lakes in the Müritz National Park. In the wider region, you can explore the landscape of the Havel headwaters by canoe, travelling downstream from Käbelicksee. This means that trails on land and experiences on the water are available as different interests for your trip, rather than as a single combined route.
Discover and learn about wolves
In the wider region, the two-kilometre Zwenzow Wolf Trail is aimed at children and adults and shares in-depth knowledge about wolves. Interactive stations explain the animals’ behaviour. The trail also includes a historic wolf pit and a fairy-tale hut featuring myths about wolves. It therefore brings together nature education, a historic site and stories about the animal.
The guided tour “Unterwegs auf dem Wolfspfad” with Otto Woit offers another way to explore the subject in depth. It is about five kilometres long and covers the wolf’s way of life and history, as well as animals, habitats, plants and trees. If you’re interested in a guided bike tour through the wider area, a roughly 20-kilometre cycling tour to the Havel headwaters between Kratzeburg and Ankershagen takes you through a landscape shaped by the Ice Age.
Explore other destinations here: Vorpommern-Rügen, Rostock, Schleswig-Flensburg, Mecklenburg Lake District, Ludwigslust-Parchim, Lübeck, Vorpommern-Greifswald.
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