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Take Me To The Waters - Europe

Being waterside doesn’t have to mean being beside the sea, as Andrew Eames discovers – especially in Europe, a continent blessed with endless freshwater lakes and rivers all just waiting to be explored

Row your boat New Forest

Is it a cottage, or is it an oil painting? It would be hard to find a more idyllic location than this thatched and half-timbered hideaway on the banks of the River Avon in the heart of the New Forest. Undercastle Cottage is a place of open fires, burbling waters, and darting kingfishers. French windows open out onto a terrace overlooking the water, with a rowboat bobbing at the end of the lawn. The property has over 1,000m of fishing on the much-prized Avon, with the odd salmon spotted in season. And if you can drag yourself away from the terrace, the hammock and the herbaceous borders, then there’s the whole New Forest lurking to the south and east, from the tea rooms of Lyndhurst to the sequoias of the Tall Trees Trail, by Brockenhurst.

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Travel Details

Undercastle Cottage sleeps six. Costs from £1,108 for a long weekend. boutique-retreats.co.uk

Go with the Gota Canal Sweden

Cross Sweden on board the world’s oldest cruise ship, the 145-year-old MS Juno – the Orient Express of sweet-water cruising. Snub-nosed and box-shaped for the most efficient use of the lock system, this 29-cabin passenger ship is a thing of rare beauty, featuring mahogany fittings, polished hardwood decks, small but elegant wallpapered cabins and comfortable wicker chairs from which to watch the landscape slip by. The view is of gossamer threads of early-morning mist, of gazebos on summer lawns, and of canal-side reeds bowing deeply at the Juno’s passing. Like her sister ship, Wilhelm Tham, Juno sets off every week to cross from Gothenburg to Stockholm via a canal system that links lake with lake, including an eight-hour crossing of Sweden’s largest, island-strewn Lake Vänern. Meals are served in the handsome saloon and feature typically Swedish combinations of seasonal fish, fresh local vegetables and mushrooms, ending with a fruit-based dessert.

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Travel Details

The Classic Canal Cruise on the Juno takes four days. Costs from £1,093pp, full board. gotakanal.se

Trek the Douro Valley Portugal

‘Bucolic’ is the word for Portugal’s so-called ‘river of gold’. The calm blue blade of the River Douro divides fertile hills, which are sometimes neatly manicured with vines, sometimes layered in hardscrabble terraces of olive trees, baking in the midday sun to a tranquil background of birdsong. The valley’s serenity is interrupted only by the occasional village, with its red-tiled roofs and whitewashed walls, or by the passage of the traditional rabelo long boats, which the region’s port wine producers used to use to transport barrels from their quintas (wine estates) to downriver warehouses in Porto and Vila Nova de Gaia. Inntravel’s week-long ramble up the Douro starts in the northern capital of Porto before heading upcountry on a spectacularly engineered little railway that skips along the water’s edge to the river port of Pinhão. From here you’re on foot, sometimes up on the ridges, sometimes down by the waterside of the Douro’s tributary, the Pinhão, exploring tranquil vineyards and looping between valleys on pretty woodland paths. Accommodation ranges from luxury hotels to secluded manor houses and family-run retreats.

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Travel Details

The seven-night trip includes hotel accommodation with breakfast, plus five dinners, three picnics and key local transport. Costs from £1,070pp. inntravel.co.uk

Embark on a green adventure Slovenia

The emerald-hued River Soča, in Slovenia’s Julian Alps, was centre stage in the Narnia films, and entering this Eden, in the country’s northern Triglav National Park, feels like clambering through the back of the European wardrobe to emerge, blinking, into the sun, with the Soča bounding puppy-like out of the mountains to meet you. Having picked up its unforgettable colour
in underground limestone caverns, the Soča completes its first few miles at some speed, working its way through deep canyons, until the valley opens out by the town of Bovec and a more mature river relaxes into languid pools lined with silky-white sand and filled with rare marble trout. It is here, too, that the Soča valley’s tourism begins in earnest, with the river the focus of everything, whether it’s fishing, swimming, kayaking or whitewater rafting. All of these are available if you embark on an action-packed outdoor adventure with Red Savvanah, along with canyoning, hiking, riding beautiful Lipizzaner horses, biking and picnicking. After expending all that energy, you can look forward to the final couple of nights spent in the historic Grand Hotel Toplice on the shores of beautiful Lake Bled, famed for its healing thermal springs.

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Travel Details

Red Savannah’s eight-day Outdoor Adventure in Slovenia includes five days in the valley. Costs from £967pp, including transfers, accommodation and breakfast. redsavannah.com

Bike and barge it The Netherlands

In a nation interlaced with 6,000km of navigable waterways and 32,000km of bike and canal paths, you’d be a fool to go anywhere by car. Meadowlands and windmills, cobbled lanes and gable ends, dykes and polders – all are best accessed via water in the Netherlands. There’s no better place for peering into beautifully-kept back gardens, grazing on smoked eel or mooing at Friesians. Freedom Treks offers lots of potential itineraries – for example, its Highlights of Holland Boat & Bike tour aboard Flora, a barge of 10 roomy ensuite cabins – that might include the Ijsselmeer, a former sea still encrusted with Golden Age ports such as Hoorn, the cheese country around Edam and ancient Haarlem. The boats provide bed, breakfast, packed lunch and dinner, and relocate daily to provide a week’s worth of new beginnings.

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Travel Details

Freedom Treks’ Highlights of Holland seven-night boat and bike tour includes full board plus bikes. Costs from £777pp. freedomtreks.co.uk

Navigate the lakes Germany

Known as the ‘Land of a Thousand Lakes’, the Mecklenburg lake district is pillowed in the soft woodland and rolling agricultural land of Mecklenburg-Vorpommen, north of Berlin. Its serene waters make for a gentle adventure – it’s a world of boathouses on stilts and busy freshwater fishermen working their nets, and best explored by chartering your own boat. Besides handsome waterfront towns such as Müritz, on the largest lake, there are grand country houses like Mirow, whose castle-island was the birthplace of Queen Sophie-Charlotte, who married our King George III. There’s also Rheinsberg, with its schloss built for Crown Prince Frederick, who apparently ‘felt very little love for the female species’ but was forced to marry and to live in this idyllic love nest. Or sobering Ravensbrück, the former concentration camp where only women were incarcerated and which stands today as a monument to a lesser-known side of the Nazi era. Steer your own course with Kuhnle Tours, which offers 26 different kinds of boat for charter, from compact cabin cruisers in basic and hi-tech options to fully fledged houseboats and bigger vessels for more serious excursions. Whichever you choose, in the evening seek out your own reed-sheltered anchorage, where only paddling coots and moorhens disturb the peace.

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Travel Details

A Kormoran 940 cruiser will sleep up to 5 and is based at Hafendorf Müritz. Costs from £1,935 for a week in July. kuhnle-tours.com

Canoe the Spey Scotland

If you’re up for getting in amongst it, Wilderness Scotland’s classic river trip will flip your kilt. The adventure specialist’s guided descent of the River Spey in open canoes takes you past pine forests and colourful heather-covered hills and through Scotland’s most celebrated whisky region. You’ll start at Aviemore with a warm-up paddle on a tranquil loch, and head off the following day on a four-day river journey from the Boat of Garten, famed for its osprey nests and views of the Cairngorm mountains, paddling your way down the waterway until emerging by the sea at Spey Bay. Nights are spent in guesthouses and campsites on the river banks, where red squirrels and capercaillie roam, while days are passed idling across limpid river pools, watching for golden eagles, and acquiring the skills to deal with more challenging rapids such as the Washing Machine, towards journey’s end. Villages en route – Tormore, Aberlour, Knockando – are famous for their uisge-beatha, the water of life, aka whisky, so there’s bound to be some tastings along the way.

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Travel Details

Wilderness Scotland’s five-day Open Canoeing River Spey Descent includes meals and accommodation. Costs from £865pp. wildernessscotland.com

Drink in Èvian France

The spa town of Évian-les-Bains sits on the southern (French) side of Lake Geneva, or Lac Léman as it is locally known. At one side rise mountains and semi-alpine pastures which constitute its ‘impluvium’ – a fancy word for a water catchment area – while the other is given over to another kind of liquid, this being Switzerland’s most productive wine region. But Évian is all about the water that filters down through mineral-rich bedrock to emerge via a clutch of lakeside springs responsible for transforming what was once a fishing village into a belle époque spa town. Here, lavish hotels are set among lush lawns – such as the Hôtel Ermitage, where you can spa and golf to your heart’s content. There are spacious rooms and suites overlooking Lac Léman (as well as a purpose-built Kids’ Resort, leaving you free to enjoy them), and whether you’re here for the golf, the casinos or the medical benefits to your liver, you can’t help but be invigorated. Anyone with a spirit of adventure should take the navette shuttle bus that climbs the hill onto the Plateau de Gavot, a meadowland covered in hiking trails with views to Mont Blanc. The sumptuous Chablais grasslands up here are known for legendary thick and creamy Beaufort and Reblochon cheeses, served in roadside inns.

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Travel Details

A weekend bed-and-brunch package at Hôtel Ermitage includes unlimited use of the sports and wellbeing facilities. Costs from £293 for two. evianresort.com

Lap up the luxury Finland

Lake Saimaa, Finland’s largest, is utterly serene in summer, and at 4,400 sq km (the fourth largest in Europe), it’s easy to have much of it to yourself, especially as Saimaa is part lake, part labyrinth, thanks to its thousands of islands. Wildlife shares its peace, too, with moose, blue hares and even wolves and bears feeling quite at home in the forests that surround it. If you’re lucky, you may even see the Saimaa ringed seal, the world’s most endangered pinniped, of which only 390 are left. Scandinavians love their lonely island cabins, and there are a few of those here, but the best option for a quick taster visit is to stay on a static houseboat with its own sauna (of course!), as furnished in some style by Hotel & Spa Järvisydän, via Magnetic North Travel. Explore the further reaches of the lake in a classic wooden launch, enjoy a local, seasonal lunch prepared on a remote island, swim and paddleboard to your heart’s content in summer, or go in September to take advantage of the ruska, or autumn, season, when the lakeshore is ringed in foliage of silver and gold and carpeted in crimson and orange as the cloudberry and bilberry harvest gets into full swing.

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Travel Details

Three nights on the houseboat, full board, includes island safari and stand-up paddleboarding. Costs £1,395pp. magneticnorthtravel.com

Quaff and Cruise Bordeaux

Twenty years ago, Bordeaux’s quayside was a gloomy old place of semi-derelict warehouses, covered in grime, on the banks of the Garonne. Today, the city has been reborn as a freshly-scrubbed World Heritage Site of gold-coloured limestone, now complete with the flagship Cité du Vin wine museum, whose gleaming, organic design was inspired by the swirl of wine in a glass. Most of the riverside warehouses have gone, and in their place are smart river cruisers, such as those provided by AMA Waterways, which set off from here to travel up the Garonne and adjoining Dordogne to visit riverside wine regions such as Saint-Émilion, Médoc and Sauternes, dipping onshore for tastings in the châteaux of wine estates as they go. But it’s not all crystalline clinking and trying to identify the gooseberry nose; there are riverside walks, cycle rides and visits to local markets, too.

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Travel Details

The seven-night Taste of Bordeaux Wine Cruise with AMA Waterways includes unlimited win. Costs from £2,031pp full board. amawaterways.com

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