Wadden Sea

The Wadden Sea is a vast coastal lagoon shared by the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, a landscape so flat and so entirely shaped by tidal change that it seems less like a sea and more like a slow-motion drama played out twice a day before an audience of birds. The tide here rises and falls by as much as four metres; at low water the sea withdraws up to 30 kilometres from the coastline, leaving behind a rippled plain of grey mud and sand, cut by winding tidal creeks and studded with mussel beds, tidal sandbars and the dark shapes of stranded fishing boats.

From the dykes and causeways of the North German coast — the islands of Nordstrand and Pellworm, the chain of East Frisian islands stretching from Borkum to Wangerooge, and the West Frisian chain on the Dutch side — the exposed seabed stretches to the horizon in every direction, interrupted only by the low silhouettes of the barrier islands. The Wadden Sea is one of the most important stopover points on the East Atlantic Flyway, used by more than 50 species of wading birds — curlews with their long curved bills, black-tailed godwits, knots, dunlins and the iconic Eurasian oystercatcher — that travel between their breeding grounds in the Siberian and Arctic tundra and their wintering areas on the coasts of West Africa.

The mudflats are also rich in marine life: brown shrimps, shore crabs, lugworms and flatshell clams support a food chain that reaches up to common seals and grey seals, which haul out on the sandbanks in groups of hundreds to rest and moult, their silhouettes visible from shore. The wind is omnipresent and shapes the flats as surely as the tide: salt marshes accumulate on the leeward sides of islands, tidal creeks migrate and silt up over seasons, and individual sandbars emerge and disappear, making the Wadden Sea a landscape in constant geological motion.

UNESCO inscribed the Dutch-German Wadden Sea as a World Heritage Site in 2009 and extended the designation to the Danish Wadden Sea area in 2014, making it the largest coherent tidal flat system in the world to receive this protection. The visitor experience is defined by guided mudflat hikes: organised walks led by naturalist guides that lead out onto the exposed seabed, sometimes reaching offshore sandbars two or three kilometres from the shore where seals can be approached at close range. At high water the sea returns, silently at first and then with increasing force and sound, flooding the creeks and restoring the flats to the exclusive domain of birds and grey seals.

It is the largest unbroken system of tidal flats in the world, a UNESCO-listed landscape of global ecological importance.

The twice-daily tidal reveal is a genuinely unique natural spectacle unavailable anywhere else at this scale in Europe.

Guided mudflat hikes allow close observation of seals, wading birds and the extraordinary seabed landscape.