Улцен

Uelzen owns the most joyful railway station in Germany. For Expo 2000, Friedensreich Hundertwasser transformed the town's ordinary junction into one of his last completed works: golden spheres on candy-striped columns, undulating floors, mosaic fountains and not a straight line tolerated — the Hundertwasser-Bahnhof, a working station that functions as a pilgrimage site for the architect's admirers, with over a million travellers a year passing through a fairytale.

The town behind it is a Hanseatic veteran of the salt road between Lüneburg and the south, and keeps the evidence in dignified brick: the Gothic hall church of St Marien with its slender tower guards the "Goldenes Schiff", a gleaming medieval reliquary in the form of a ship that serves as the town's talisman; half-timbered courts, the old tithe barn and the Heilig-Geist-Kapelle fill in the merchant centuries, and the town's beer and grain trades endure in a working sugar factory and breweries — provincial prosperity of the durable kind.

Around Uelzen spreads the Lüneburg Heath, and this is the town's second season of pilgrimage: in August and September the Heidschnucken sheep move through hills turned violet with blooming heather, juniper standing sentinel — one of northern Germany's great landscape spectacles, reached by bicycle paths that radiate from town. A golden ship, a purple heath and a station wearing confetti: Uelzen rewards the traveller who steps off the train.