German Volcano Road

Germany has volcanoes — and the German Volcano Road through the Eifel region is where you go to find them. Not the fire-breathing variety (the last Eifel eruption was around 10,000 years ago), but a remarkably preserved volcanic landscape of craters, lava flows, basalt columns, and the most photogenic feature: the Maare. These circular crater lakes, formed when rising magma met groundwater and caused violent phreatomagmatic explosions, are among the most beautiful and unusual lakes in Europe. Perfectly round, strikingly deep (the Gemündener Maar reaches 39 metres), surrounded by forested rims, and so still that the reflections are perfect.

The 280-kilometre route loops through the western Eifel hills, connecting 39 geological sights officially recognised on the Vulkanstraße. It begins at the Laacher See — the largest and most impressive of all the Eifel lakes, actually a collapsed volcanic caldera 3.5 kilometres across. The Benedictine Abbey Maria Laach on its shore, founded in 1093, is one of the best-preserved Romanesque monasteries in Germany and still an active monastic community producing beer, fruit, and vegetables. The combination of abbey and volcanic lake is genuinely unusual and worth an extended stop. The lake still releases carbon dioxide from the volcanic activity far below — bubbles rise from the water near the shore, a peculiar reminder of what lies beneath.

The core of the Volcano Road winds through the Daun Maare (three lakes near the town of Daun) and the Mosenberg, where a series of overlapping craters forms a volcanic landscape that geologists come from around the world to study. Near Manderscheid, the two ruined hilltop castles overlooking the Lieser valley date from the same period as the Norman conquest of England — their setting on volcanic basalt promontories is particularly dramatic. The town of Gerolstein has a beer brewing tradition going back centuries and is built directly on a Devonian coral reef (this whole region was once a tropical sea).

The Eifel's volcanic heritage extends underground. Several former basalt quarries have been converted into visitor sites where you can walk through lava tunnels and examine volcanic rock formations. The Lava-Dome near Mendig (the former Herchenberg tunnel) is an impressive underground chamber carved out by lava and later used for millennia as a cool beer cellar.

For VW T3 drivers: the Eifel is hilly but not dramatically steep. The roads wind constantly through forested valleys and over ridges, requiring frequent gear changes but no single pass of extreme gradient. Engine temperatures remain manageable. The main advice is to take the Maar road detours (often narrow one-lane forest roads down to the lake shores) carefully — passing places are infrequent and reversing a van on a forest slope requires patience. The Eifel is a popular weekend destination from Cologne and the Rhineland, so summer weekends can see some traffic; midweek is significantly quieter.