Heringsdorf: imperial villas on the island of Usedom

A former vacation destination for Prussian nobility, Heringsdorf preserves white nineteenth-century villas along one of the Baltic Sea's longest beaches.

The center and waterfront, with the imperial villas of the island of Usedom, can be comfortably visited on foot.

The pier of Heringsdorf, among Germany's longest, stretches for hundreds of meters into the Baltic Sea with restaurants and shops.

Just steps away, the imperial villas in Belle Époque style, built for Prussian and Russian aristocracy at the end of the nineteenth century, line the town's waterfront.

Continuing along the coast you walk on the beach of Usedom, extending uninterrupted for over forty kilometers between Germany and Poland.

Toward evening, the fish restaurants of the waterfront serve smoked herrings, the specialty that gave the town its name.

Heringsdorf, Bansin, and Ahlbeck, the three twin resorts on the island of Usedom known as the Three Imperial Pearls, were favorite vacation destinations for Russian tsars and German emperors around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The island of Usedom enjoys one of the sunniest climates in Germany, with more hours of sunshine annually than the national average, a factor that favored its development as an imperial seaside resort.