Flensburg

Flensburg is Germany with a Danish accent. The country's northernmost city curls around its Baltic fjord a walk from the border, and the border has crossed it more often than it has crossed the border: Danish for four centuries, German since 1864, it keeps a cherished Danish minority with its own schools, churches and libraries — and a bilingual ease that flavours everything from pastries to politics. The old town's merchant courtyards descend to a harbour where museum ships ride at the quay and the shipyards' memory salts the air.

The city's golden age smelled of sugar and rum: Flensburg's fleet sailed to the Danish West Indies, returning with cane that its distilleries turned into the rum that made the town famous across the North — the Rum Museum in an old merchant house tells the heady story, and a glass of Flensburg rum grog remains the local sacrament against Baltic weather. The Flensburger brewery adds the beer whose swing-top "plop" is nationally onomatopoeic.

Every German driver knows the city for graver reasons: the federal register of traffic offences resides here, making "points in Flensburg" the national euphemism for misbehaviour at the wheel. Handball devotion (the SG's European triumphs), the Landestheater sailing between the region's stages, and the fjord's sailing summers complete the northernmost picture: Germany, gently Danish, slightly rum.