Nida Beach

Nida is on the Curonian Spit, a sand bar ninety-eight kilometres long separating the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea. The spit is divided halfway along: the northern half is Lithuanian, the southern half is the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, and the border runs across the sand.

The dunes here have a documented history of destruction. Forest clearance from the sixteenth century onward destabilised the sand, and the dunes began moving east across the spit at up to twenty metres a year, burying at least fourteen villages over three centuries. Reafforestation began in the nineteenth century and stabilised most of the spit; the Parnidis dune at Nida is one of the few still moving, and the sundial monument on its summit was itself damaged by a storm and rebuilt.

The seaward beach is fine pale sand with dunes and pine behind, and it runs the entire length of the spit with almost nothing built on it — cars are restricted, there is one road, and access to the beach is by paths through the forest. The Baltic here is cold, brackish and shallow, warming to perhaps 20°C in August. Sections are designated for women, men and mixed use, an old German bathing convention that survives. Thomas Mann built a summer house on the dune above Nida in 1930 and wrote there for three seasons; it is now a museum and the view from it is the one the spit is known for.

The spit was inscribed by UNESCO in 2000 as a cultural landscape shared by Lithuania and Russia, on the basis that it exists only because of continuous human effort to hold the sand. Juodkrantė further north has the Hill of Witches, a forest path of carved wooden figures, and the grey heron and cormorant colony.

Stay on the marked paths. The dunes here buried fourteen villages once the forest was cleared, and the two centuries of planting that stopped them is the only reason the spit still exists. Walk to the sundial, look at the Russian half from the top, and cycle the forest road rather than driving it.