The oldest part of Werder is an island in the Havel, round as a coin, joined to the mainland by a bridge that a deed already took for granted in 1317. That deed records the margraves' ministeriales selling their estates here to the monks of Lehnin Abbey, and it is not even the year's first mention: a charter of Margrave Waldemar names the place on 5 April 1317, months before the Lehnin sale in August. The name itself is a landscape word. Werder - like Wörth in Upper German - simply means river island. Older traces sit at the edges of the settlement: broken glass at the southwest end, and at the south end the remains of what may have been an early medieval Slavic castle wall. Swedish troops wrecked the town during the Thirty Years' War, and it rebuilt, as Brandenburg towns generally did.

Wine was the second-oldest trade here after fishing, brought to the Havel before 1300 by Cistercian monks, and for a while it was serious business - more than a hundred hectares under vine in the first half of the eighteenth century. Then the climate had its say. The frost of the winter of 1739/40 lasted into June. Both wine and fishing declined through the eighteenth century, and fruit filled the gap. The Lehnin monks had cultivated orchards here from early on, and Werder simply kept going: cherries, apples and strawberries above all, but also raspberries, gooseberries, currants, blackberries, apricots, peaches, pears and plums. Tomatoes came later, most of them under glass. The blossom festival is not a marketing invention layered onto a pretty town. It is the annual advertisement for what the sandy ground actually does.

The festival now falls in the week around 1 May and runs roughly ten days. Historically, residents simply sold wine out of their own gardens - no licence, no marquee, just a table and a view over the trees. That informality survives in modified form: numerous fruit farms in the surrounding villages open their yards, and the best fruit wines are judged and awarded so-called Golden, Silver and Bronze Kruken, the stoneware jugs the wine has always been served in. Werder counted about 300,000 visitors in 1993, then averaged half a million as word spread. Covid cancelled the festival three years running, from 2020 to 2022, and the 144th edition returned in 2023 in a deliberately quieter, more family-shaped format - a decision that annoyed some and relieved others.

North of the town, an airfield operated before and during the Second World War, used together with an adjacent park to train pilots. Werder was the base of the Luftwaffe general Karl Koller during the Battle of Berlin, which put a very small Brandenburg orchard town briefly at the centre of the Reich's collapsing air command. Soviet troops moved into the same ground after the war and stayed for decades; the last Russian soldiers left in the early 1990s, a few years after reunification. It is an ordinary Brandenburg sequence - Prussian, Nazi, Soviet, federal - compressed into one patch of pine forest at the edge of a town that spends most of its energy on fruit.

Werder holds the federal designation Erholungsort, which is not decorative: it certifies air and climate quality suitable for recuperation, and it has to be re-earned. The town's most famous residents were drawn by roughly the same qualities. Karl Hagemeister, born here in 1848, painted the water and light of these lakes for a living. Anna Simson, born in 1835, spent her life on women's rights. Adolf Damaschke, the land-reform economist, moved here in 1907 and stayed. In the outlying village of Petzow there is a small castle, a church, a fisherman's house and a former brickyard, all within a walk of the shore - the kind of arrangement that makes a place feel like it was designed for a slow afternoon, though nobody designed it at all.