So this is the time of year when we take a moment to do a bit of navel-gazing, and in our case that means taking a look at our page views for the year just finished to see if they can tell us anything about our reader’s interests and travel habits.

The overall winner, way out on top, is our coverage of Germany’s theme parks, and particularly Europa Park, Rust, which recently celebrated its best-ever year. Lucky them, getting a lot of free traffic via us!

That is followed by our page on the beautiful beaches of the Baltic, which is perhaps a bit of a surprise, given that the former East doesn’t generally rank highly on most travel itineraries. But then our page on the East in general follows quickly on, suggesting that last year’s travellers may have been inspired by the 25th anniversary of the Fall of the Wall to have a peek at what once lay behind.

On a similar theme, but more historic, our page on What Happened to the Prussians ranks very highly, and attracts the most reader comments of all our pages, as people try to find out more about their ancestors.

Next on the list comes another less obvious choice: our page on Hut Hiking in the Alps. We presume that this page gets a lot of hits because it isn’t easy to get relevant information on this phenomenon, which isn’t widely known outside continental Europe.

Then come more obviously touristic subjects: the Black Forest and Harz Mountains, and Mad King Ludwig’s fabulous castles. Cultural and gastronomic traditions such as Shrebergarten alotments, beer, applewine, stollen, and nudity on the beaches are all popular.

A lot of people come onto the site looking for German-specialist tour operators, of which we provide a listing in our Getting There section (frankly, there aren’t many). A perennial favourite is our Weird & Wunderbar section, in which we store bits of video and images which have something unusual to say about Germany and the Germans.

Amongst the hotel options we recommend, the most popular is the delightful sleeping beauty’s castle Dornröschenschloss Sababurg, although we doubt many people actually stay there, given the limited availability of rooms. Also very popular is the Ayurveda Parkschlösschen on the banks of the Mosel.

There’s plenty of other stuff on the site which doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but it is all worth hunting out, depending on where you want to go, and when. We like to think of them as GermanyisWunderbar’s hidden gems!