The Curonian Spit and the Baltic coast by bike

The south-eastern shore of the Baltic is low and sandy, and in one place the sea and the wind have built something remarkable. The Curonian Spit is a narrow strip of sand dunes and forest, barely a few kilometres across at its widest and in places only a few hundred metres, running for nearly a hundred kilometres between the open Baltic and the shallow Curonian Lagoon. Its northern half belongs to Lithuania, its southern half to the Russian region of Kaliningrad. The whole spit is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A landscape made by the wind

The spit is a young landscape, formed over the last few thousand years from sand carried by the currents and piled up by the wind. Its great dunes, some of the highest in Europe, have always moved, and in the past they were a danger. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, after the forests that held them in place were cut down, the dunes began to march across the spit, burying villages and forcing their inhabitants to move. Some of those villages still lie under the sand.

In the nineteenth century, a long campaign of planting, with grasses, mountain pine and other trees, stabilised much of the spit, and today most of it is covered in forest. But in places the open dunes remain. Near Nida, the Parnidis dune rises high above the lagoon, and from its top there are views across a vast landscape of sand, the so-called Lithuanian Sahara, towards the Russian border.

Nida and Juodkrantė

Nida, near the southern end of the Lithuanian part, is the spit's main village, a place of wooden fishermen's houses painted in deep blue and red, with carved weathervanes on boats and gables. It was a favourite summer retreat for artists, and the German writer Thomas Mann built a summer house here in 1930, which is now a museum.

Juodkrantė, further north, is a small resort on the lagoon side. Its Hill of Witches is a forest trail lined with carved wooden figures from Lithuanian folklore, witches, devils and heroes, made by folk artists. Nearby, a large colony of grey herons and cormorants nests in the pines.

Cycling the spit and the coast

A long cycle path runs the length of the Lithuanian part of the spit, from the ferry at Smiltynė opposite Klaipėda down to Nida. It is mostly flat and well surfaced, winding through pine forest with occasional glimpses of the lagoon on one side and paths to the beaches on the other. The sea beaches on the Baltic side are wide, white and often empty.

Across the lagoon, on the mainland, Ventė Cape is one of the best places on the coast for watching migrating birds. The spit and the lagoon lie on one of the great flyways between northern Europe and Africa, and in autumn huge numbers of birds pass over the cape. Its bird-ringing station, set up in the 1920s, is one of the oldest in Europe, and its nets catch and record thousands of birds on a good day.

North of the spit, the mainland coast continues with Klaipėda, Lithuania's only seaport, a city with an old town of German timber-framed buildings, and Palanga, a lively seaside resort with a long wooden pier and a botanical park around a former palace with an amber museum. The Baltic coast is famous for its amber, the fossilised resin of ancient pine forests, which still washes up on the beaches after storms.

The holidays

Explore Worldwide's Cycling the Baltic States, eight nights, is a cycling holiday that starts in Vilnius and Trakai and rides to the coast, with Kintai, Ventė Cape, Dreverna, Klaipėda, the Curonian Spit, Juodkrantė, Nida, Smiltynė, Palanga and Šventoji. It runs from May to September.

For those who would rather see the capitals, Explore's Baltic Capital Cities, seven nights, travels by road from Vilnius through Trakai, Kaunas and the Hill of Crosses to Riga, Pärnu and Tallinn.

The cycling season is short and sweet: from late May to early September, when the days are long, the forests smell of pine and the sea, though cool, is swimmable on a warm day. June brings the longest days, and the light on the dunes in the late evening is extraordinary.