Висмар

Wismar is brick Gothic at full sail. The Hanseatic port's old town — UNESCO-listed together with Stralsund — preserves the League's world with rare completeness: the vast market square, among northern Germany's largest, ringed by gabled centuries and centred on the Wasserkunst, the Dutch-Renaissance pavilion that watered the city for three hundred years; the harbour basin where the "Alter Schwede" house of 1380 recalls both the town's oldest architecture and its second sovereign — Sweden, which ruled Wismar for nearly two centuries after the Thirty Years' War and left the mustachioed "Swedish Heads" as harbour guardians and festival mascots. The churches state the city's old wealth in cathedral dimensions: St Nikolai's nave rises among the tallest brick vaults in Europe, while St Georgen, war-ruined and patiently resurrected, now hosts concerts and exhibitions beneath its restored heights.

Cinema found its nightmare here: Murnau shot Nosferatu in Wismar in 1922, the vampire's shadow crossing these very gables and the harbour's masts — film history's first great horror bears the city's watermark, celebrated now with screenings in fittingly Gothic settings.

Shipbuilding still works the waterfront; herring, Swedish Festival and Hanse sail weeks work the calendar. Between vaults, vampires and the Baltic light, Wismar offers the Hansa unabridged — red brick, salt water, long memory.