Wadden Sea National Park

The flat marshlands and tidal flats that surround Tønder on the west are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Wadden Sea, the world's largest intertidal mudflat system. This is not conventional scenic beauty — the landscape is stark, horizontal, and almost oppressively vast — but it has a particular quality that grows on you. Huge skies, migrating birds by the millions, and a silence broken only by wind and the calls of waders.

Højer, about 10 kilometres west of Tønder, is the main gateway to the Danish section of the Wadden Sea. From here you can take guided mudflat walks at low tide, cycle the dyke paths through the coastal marsh, or simply stand and watch the light shift across the flats. In spring and autumn the birdlife is extraordinary: godwits, dunlin, knot, oystercatchers, and avocets in vast numbers on passage.

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The Wadden Sea is the world's largest unbroken system of intertidal sand and mud flats — about 500 kilometres from Den Helder in the Netherlands to Blåvandshuk in Denmark, with the German coast in between. At low tide, the flat expanse of wet sand and mudflat stretches for kilometres, and the returning tide can move faster than a person can walk across the softer sections. Mudwalking (wadlopen) into the exposed flats is a tradition in both the Danish and German sections.

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