Lower Saxony, Germany

Lower Saxony is the big flat state that stretches from the North Sea coast to the Harz mountains, and it contains the country's car industry and its most genuinely plain landscape at once. Hanover is the state capital with the trade fairs that are the biggest in the world for their sectors, Wolfsburg is the company town that exists entirely for Volkswagen, Göttingen is the old university town with the mathematicians who changed the subject, the Lüneburg Heath is the purple moorland the country reads about at school, and the East Frisian Islands are the chain of fishing-and-beach islands off the coast where the German relationship with the North Sea actually happens.

The state's character is northern-protestant and genuinely understated — flat, orderly, tea-drinking in the East Frisian corner against all German expectations, and with a real coastal holiday culture on the islands and the Wadden Sea. The local dialect is Low German and mostly spoken by the older generation.

Expect real northern reserve, genuine island-holiday talk, and a state where tea is the regional drink and nobody argues about it.

Nearby: Hamburg Bremen Berlin Brandenburg