It’s not just about the football. For the next four weeks, Germany wants desperately to charm the lederhosen off us in every possible way — to persuade the world that it can host a lot more than football tournaments, opera marathons and beer festivals: “You went out on penalties, now come back on holiday.” And, perhaps surprisingly, not everyone needs convincing. Quietly (efficiently?), Germany has become a destination for discerning travellers.

Not, admittedly, in the short term, when men with St George’s crosses creosoted into their chest hair will be doing their best to render the entire nation uninhabitable — but, once the tear gas clears, what will remain is an unfailingly polite, hospitable country, in quiet possession of a handful of genuinely special destinations. A trickle of Brits are already choosing the Bavarian Alps over the money-grubbier French and Italian sections, sampling the vinicultural peace of Franconia ahead of the Loire, even plumping for the quirky chic of the northern coast in summer, rather than the crowds, costs and, well, Germans tarnishing the Med.

Are they mad, or right? We sent three writers to see what all the Sturm und Drang is about.

Beaches

RÜGEN BASKS in warm, nostalgic history. Binz, the sweetest belle époque spa town you’ll ever see, sits at the southern end of its Caribbean-class beach, its wood-and-whitewash villas creaking under the weight of crazily carved balconies, stucco mermaids and romantisch turrets shaped like Prussian helmets. Built for Germany’s kaisers and Burgermeisters a century ago, when the resort island of Rügen was in its fashionable first flush, they’re immaculate: if the RSC started doing Gilbert and Sullivan, this is what the sets would look like.

And they’re typical of the island’s gentle charm. Lying just off the Baltic coast, due north of Berlin, it occupies a similar place in the German popular imagination as the Isle of Wight does among Englanders. Just as Wight represents a certain kind of faded, genteel Britishness, so Rügen is the Bundesrepublik-on-sea — brisk, beautifully calibrated and quaint, in a freshly painted, new-broom way.

Its mile-long beaches are spotless — especially the Schaabe, a shining crescent of undeveloped shore backed by Harpic-fresh pines. Its villages are forest-fringed, gable-ended and tidy as Legoland, particularly Vitt, a thatched fishing hamlet probably inhabited by hobbits. Like Legoland, the island has a proper steam loco, the Racing Roland, which poot-poots picturesquely between seaside hot spots and the interior’s comedy-gothic castles. Everywhere you look, yoghurt-commercial families hike to the beach in sprightly matching windcheaters, sun spangles off the sheer white chalk cliffs and the big white incisors of smiling cyclists, and happiness is a herring in a bun.

All fine and dandy, but why join them? Because Binz is the kind of rather posh seaside resort that no longer exists in Britain (even on the Isle of Wight). Nostalgic but stylish, olde-worlde but orderly, it has a promenade with both flip-flop shops and fashion boutiques, a pier with swans under it, and scores of Rügen’s trademark wicker beach loungers, the strandkörbe.

These are Vorsprung durch Technik deckchairs, and they line up in neat ranks like a candy-striped convention of Punch and Judy men, presumably drawn here by the larger than average sausages.

If the sun goes in, get on your bike. Inland excursions mostly rely on the premise that Rügen looks even lovelier if you climb a tall tower to ogle it. The best targets are the lighthouse at Kap Arkona, strafed by swallows; and the fantasy hunting lodge at Granitz, its marzipan-pink turret full of moose heads and antler furniture. Both were designed by an over-the-top architect named Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose name should have been Schinken — Mr Ham. Another day-trip must is Jasmund National Park, with 400ft crags and a multimedia “nature experience” where, by some WiFi witchcraft, exhibits talk to you through your headphones as you approach.

All very helpful, and great fun, but the island also wears a more sinister expression.

Five minutes north of Binz is the Colossus of Prora, the world’s biggest beach complex, a brutal concrete rectangle built by the Nazis to provide exercise holidays for 20,000 workers at a time. With 10,000 identical twin cells, teacups stamped with swastikas and endless bleak corridors, it’s a truly unnerving piece of travel heritage.

HOW TO DO IT

Times recommends

• Overlanding then and now
• Live Q&A: ski fitness and injury
• Get the right payment card and deny Ryanair its hefty fee