Qualla: E11 hiking trail

E11 hiking trail: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pko, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1980 the twinned cities of Haarlem and Osnabrück decided to connect themselves with a walking route. It was a modest civic gesture between two towns 200 kilometres apart, and it ran into a hard limit about 300 kilometres further east, where the German Democratic Republic began. Then the border stopped existing. Through the 1990s the E11 was extended to Berlin, then into Poland, then further, on the explicit reasoning that a footpath is a slow and stubborn argument for European integration. As now defined it runs from the North Sea beach at Scheveningen to Tallinn on the Baltic - about 4,610 kilometres through six countries. Walkers' guides still tend to treat the classic route, ending at the Polish-Lithuanian border, which is about 2,560 kilometres on its own.

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Image: Pko | CC BY-SA 3.0

E11 hiking trail: Stitched Together From Older Paths

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa), CC BY-SA 3.0. Almost nothing about the E11 was built for it. Like the other European long-distance paths, it is a route assembled by agreement out of trails that already existed, waymarked by the local hiking clubs who maintain them, and the German section reads like an inventory of regional w...

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Image: Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa) | CC BY-SA 3.0

E11 hiking trail: Fläming, Lehnin, Havel

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tubantia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Brandenburg leg is the quiet centre of the whole thing. Coming out of the Fläming hills the path reaches Bad Belzig and then Lehnin Abbey, the Cistercian house the Brandenburg margraves founded and were buried in, before turning into the eastern Havelland - a country of scatt...

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Image: Tubantia | CC BY-SA 3.0

E11 hiking trail: Straight Through the Capital

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sicherlich, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long-distance paths usually avoid cities. The E11 does the opposite - it goes in. It enters Berlin through the forest around the Olympic Stadium in Charlottenburg, picks up the Spree and the Landwehr Canal, and follows the water through the middle of the capital before coming out...

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Image: Sicherlich | CC BY-SA 3.0

E11 hiking trail: 1,209 Kilometres of Poland

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Piotr Matyja, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Polish section is the longest and the emptiest. It runs northeast through Poznań and Gniezno, crosses the Vistula at Toruń, and continues by Brodnica and Iława - a city whose modern centre exists because the old one was destroyed in the Second World War. Past the railway stat...

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Image: Piotr Matyja | CC BY-SA 3.0

E11 hiking trail: What the Trail Asks of You

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. The most dangerous animal on the E11 weighs a few milligrams. Ticks are found along the entire route, often heavily infected with the bacteria that cause Lyme disease, and east of the Harz they can also carry tick-borne encephalitis - which is worth a vaccination before you go. T...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0