Lindau, Germany: an island town of Lake Constance beneath the Alps

The historic core of Lindau sits on a small island in the eastern corner of Lake Constance, joined to the mainland by a bridge and a railway causeway, with the Alps rising across the water. Sail into its harbour and you pass between the two landmarks raised when the port was completed in 1856: a six-metre Bavarian Lion carved from sandstone and, facing it, the only lighthouse in Bavaria and the southernmost in Germany. A Bavarian town of around 25,000 people - a few thousand of them living on the island itself - Lindau stands beside the Austrian border, with Bregenz just 10 kilometres along the shore and Munich roughly 180 kilometres to the north-east.

The island is a knot of Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque streets. The Maximilianstraße, lined with arcaded patrician and half-timbered houses, runs past the Gothic Old Town Hall of 1422, while the squat Mangturm, a thirteenth-century tower, recalls the medieval harbour defences.

Seven centuries a free city

Lindau was first mentioned in the ninth century and became a Free Imperial City in 1275, a rank it held for some seven hundred years until Napoleon's reordering of Europe passed it first to Austria and then, in 1805, to Bavaria. St. Peter's church, more than a thousand years old, and the Thieves' Tower form a picturesque medieval cluster at the island's highest point.

A four-country corner

Lindau lies close to the meeting point of Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and ferries fan out across the lake to Bregenz, Konstanz, Meersburg and the Swiss shore. A mild, almost Mediterranean climate ripens fruit and wine on the surrounding slopes, and the town marks the start of the German Alpine Road into the mountains.