Husum

Husum is "the grey town by the sea" — and it was the town's own greatest son who fixed the epithet, in a poem of such tender loyalty that the greyness became a badge of honour. Theodor Storm was born here in 1817, served as the town's lawyer, and set his masterpiece Der Schimmelreiter among the dikes and storm tides of this coast; his house in the Wasserreihe is now a museum of manuscripts and memory, and the whole town reads as his backdrop — the tidal harbour in the very centre where shrimp cutters moor at the market's edge, the gabled merchant houses, the North Sea wind with its salt and its moods.

Every March the grey town stages Germany's loveliest contradiction: some four million crocuses flood the castle park in purple, a botanical mystery — the bulbs' origin is still debated, monks and dukes both credited — celebrated with a Crocus Blossom Festival and a crowned Crocus Queen. The modest Renaissance Schloss vor Husum at the park's heart adds courtly rooms and summer concerts.

Beyond the dike begins the Wadden Sea National Park, the UNESCO-listed universe of tidal flats, seals and birds in their millions; boats leave for the Halligen, those almost-islands that drown and surface with the tides. Storm's coast is unchanged in essentials: sky, water, endurance — and a town that made grey the most poetic colour on the German shore.