German rivers, lakes and seas, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 4 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Germany guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted. Shared rivers and seas appear in one learning group, even when they cross regional boundaries.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 16 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Rhine

The Rhine is about 1,230 kilometers long, some 700 of them in Germany, and is the busiest waterway in Europe: roughly 200 million tonnes of freight a year move on it. The gorge between Bingen and Koblenz is the narrow, castle-lined stretch, and the rock at Loreley is where it is deepest and narrowest.

Danube

The Danube is 2,850 kilometers long, the second longest river in Europe, and passes through ten countries, more than any other river in the world. It rises in the Black Forest and heads for the Black Sea. Near Immendingen it disappears into its own bed for part of the year and comes out in the Rhine catchment instead.

Elbe

The Elbe is about 1,094 kilometers long and rises in the Czech mountains. It is tidal for the last 140 kilometers, which is why Hamburg is a seaport 100 kilometers inland. About 95 kilometers of it were the inner-German border between 1949 and 1990, and the strip left undeveloped along it is now a nature reserve.

Weser

The Weser is the longest river that begins and ends inside Germany, at about 452 kilometers, and it begins at a stone in Hann. Münden where two other rivers meet and change the name. Bremen sits on it, and the Pied Piper is supposed to have led the children out of Hamelin, further upstream, in 1284.

Ems

The Ems is about 371 kilometers long and would be an unremarkable river except that the Meyer shipyard at Papenburg, 40 kilometers inland, builds some of the largest cruise ships in the world on it and has to float them out down a channel narrower than the ships are long.

Main

The Main is about 527 kilometers long and is the reason a barge can go from Rotterdam to the Black Sea: the Main-Danube Canal, finished in 1992 after a scheme Charlemagne started in 793, links it over the watershed. Germans use the river as a cultural line and call it the white sausage equator.

Moselle

The Moselle is about 544 kilometers long and loops so tightly through slate hills that the road beside it is twice the length of the valley. The Calmont vineyard above Bremm is pitched at around 65 degrees and is one of the steepest anybody harvests by hand anywhere.

Oder

The Oder is about 840 kilometers long and roughly 180 of them are the German-Polish border, fixed there in 1945 and recognized by a united Germany in 1990. The flood of July 1997 broke the dikes on the Polish side and was held on the German one by 30,000 soldiers working for three weeks.

Inn

The Inn is about 518 kilometers long and arrives at Passau carrying more water than the Danube it joins there, and greener with glacier flour, so for a stretch below the town the two run side by side in different colors before mixing.

Lake Constance

At about 536 square kilometers it is the third largest lake in central Europe and it supplies drinking water to roughly four and a half million people. Germany, Switzerland and Austria have never agreed a border across the open water, so it is one of the few places in Europe left deliberately undivided.

Müritz

The Müritz is about 112 square kilometers, the largest lake lying entirely inside Germany, and is nowhere more than 30 meters deep because it is a hollow the ice left rather than a valley. It is the biggest of more than a thousand lakes in the district around it, which are all the same age and the same shape.

Schweriner See

The lake is about 61 square kilometers and the castle of the dukes of Mecklenburg sits on an island in it, rebuilt in the 1850s in a French Renaissance style copied from Chambord. The state parliament meets in it, which makes it one of the few island parliaments anywhere.

North Sea

The German stretch of this coast is the Wadden Sea: tidal flats that empty for kilometers twice a day, the largest unbroken system of them in the world and on the UNESCO list. The same shallowness makes storm surges dangerous, and the one in February 1962 broke the dikes and drowned 315 people in Hamburg.

Baltic Sea

The Baltic is brackish rather than salt: so many rivers run into it and so little exchanges through the Danish straits that the surface in places is barely a fifth as salty as the ocean. It has almost no tide, and the northern end of it freezes most winters.

Bay of Mecklenburg

The bay is the western basin of the German Baltic, shallow and sheltered enough to have grown the resort towns along it in the nineteenth century. The ferries between Germany and Denmark cross the top of it from Puttgarden, on the route the Danes call the Vogelfluglinie, the bird flight line.

Szczecin Lagoon

The lagoon is about 900 square kilometers of shallow water behind two islands, and the border runs across it: the German part is called the Kleines Haff and the Polish part the Wielki Zalew. It is nowhere more than about eight meters deep, and a dredged channel is what lets ships reach Szczecin, 65 kilometers from the sea.

How this one works

The other maps of Germany

Sweden has the same map in Swedish waters. Denmark has the same map in Danish waters. India has the same map in Indian waters. Mexico has the same map in Mexican waters. United States has the same map in American waters. China has the same map in Chinese waters. Turkey has the same map in Turkish waters. France has the same map in French waters. Japan has the same map in Japanese waters. Spain has the same map in Spanish waters. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian waters. United Kingdom has the same map in British waters. Italy has the same map in Italian waters. South Korea has the same map in Korean waters. All three together on the Germany atlas page, the country itself on the Germany guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.