Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau – bohemian, travel writer and landscape gardener of great renown – designed Muskauer Park, one of the most beautiful landscaped gardens in the world, in the early 19th century. Covering around 830 hectares, it is made up of a number of smaller parks on either side of the German-Polish border, each with its own character.

Covering 240 hectares in the north Hessen city of Kassel, baroque Wilhelmshöhe Park is designed in the style of an English landscape garden and is Europe's largest hillside park. Together with Wilhelmshöhe Palace, it forms a unique whole that combines culture, nature and landscape architecture in perfect harmony.

They are really the original inhabitants of Europe: without human intervention, beech trees would still cover large areas of continental Europe. Today, unspoilt lowland beech forests are found nowhere else in the world but in Germany. The Ancient Beech Forests of Germany UNESCO World Natural Heritage site therefore offers a fascinating, romantic and incredibly diverse picture of the original European landscapes. They are an extension to the Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians, an existing cross-border World Heritage property.

The diversity of the Wadden Sea landscape on the North Sea coast makes it a unique habitat for countless species of plants and wildlife. This UNESCO World Natural Heritage site covers an area of around 11,000 square kilometres and includes the three Wadden Sea National Parks of Schleswig-Holstein , Lower Saxony , Hamburg and Denmark plus the Wadden Sea conservation area in the Netherlands.

Bingen and Rüdesheim form the southern gateway to the Upper Middle Rhine Valley, which runs for around 65 kilometres to Koblenz. With the beauty of nature, breathtaking panoramic views and an incredible wealth of castles and palaces overlooking sun-drenched vineyard slopes, the valley remains one of Europe's biggest tourist attractions.

As the first English-style landscape garden in mainland Europe, the 18th century Garden Kingdom of Dessau Wörlitz unites garden design and architecture in perfect harmony. Here you'll find manor houses, more than 100 buildings of varying sizes and a range of sweeping parks and gardens, all spread over an area of 140 square kilometres on and around the banks of the rivers Elbe and Mulde.

With more than 40,000 finds to date, the Messel Pit is one of the world's most productive fossil sites, documenting dramatic changes to the biosphere during past geological periods. It reveals the wonders of evolution around 47 million years ago and was designated Germany's first UNESCO World Natural Heritage site in 1995.