Düsseldorf has long been the headquarters city for the Ruhr, Germany’s powerhouse industrial region. It is the place for worker relaxation and for the spending of big industrialist salaries, which in turn patronises great arts and culture in a succession of big public galleries. It pays for eyecatching city architecture, too, and the net result is the secondmost liveable city in Germany (after Munich).

The city’s mostly pedestrianized centre is so new and modern it feels like an architect’s model. There’s Daniel Liebeskind’s curvaceous Kö-Bogen, whose ‘cuts’ in its façade sprout with greenery, and nearby Kö-Bogen II, a shopping centre disguised under beech hedges. Its most famous more traditional shopping boulevard, the ‘Kö’ – Königsallee – looks like a slice of Amsterdam, running as it does down both sides of a leafy canal, lined with flagship stores of famous names and patrolled by the unfeasibly tanned.

The old town

Beyond the Kö towards the Rhine is old Düsseldorf, a network of cobbled streets busy with bars and restaurants. There’s not a lot in the way of truly old architecture here but what it lacks in antiquity it makes up for in conviviality. The nightlife is vibrant, particularly along Bolkerstrasse, although you might want to steer clear on a football night.

The speciality of some of the old town taverns is Altbier, whose darker colour comes from the roasting of the malt. It is unpasteurised, so best drunk fresh at traditional locations like Uerige, Füchschen or Schlüssel, where the breweries themselves are directly on site. Here there’s a whole culture around drinking, mostly at convivial standing tables, where service is by middle-aged men (Köbes) who record your tally with marks on your beer mat.

Bordering the old town is the Rhine, with fully laden barges lumbering laboriously around its giant bend. Sheep graze on the floodplain on the far bank, while the near bank is lined with a long promenade, hugely popular amongst locals when the weather is kind. There are bars here, but the most dramatic view is from the top of the 240 metre Rheinturm, looking down on the river and the parliament building.

The city has a big encampment of galleries and concert halls – mostly just downriver from the old town – with a particularly large and significant art academy. No fewer than four art movements started here in the 1960s, during the time when the likes of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter were students. These days its K20 art gallery has one of the biggest collection of 20^th century artists – Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Chagall etc – of any institutions in the world.

Art in the region has always been cutting edge, but not always recognised as such. Back in the 1980s, Joseph Beuys placed five kilograms of butter in an exhibition in the art academy, and called it ‘Fat Corner’. Eventually a gallery cleaner mistakenly cleared it away. Ever since then there’s been a German saying: Ist das Kunst oder kann das weg? “Is it art, or can I throw it away?”

There’s a reason why Germany became the pre-eminent industrial power in Europe, and it’s located in the strip of land between the Rhine and Westphalia. It’s the land that sits north of the River Ruhr, a tributary of the Rhine, between Duisburg in the west and Dortmund in the east, commonly known as the Ruhrgebiet.

Never mind all the German fantasy castles, if you want to discover and understand real German history you need to spend some time in this gritty area. The history may not be sexy, it’s far too dirty for that, but from 1860 to 1960 the Ruhrgebiet was the most important area in the whole of Europe.

From the middle of the 19th century mines were sunk here wherever there was a seam of coal. What had been a quiet undeveloped rural landscape became a highly industrialised conurbation, with towns increasing in size at an unprecedented rate. Gelsenkirchen went from a population of 653 in 1843 to 169,000 in 1910 and over 300,000 by the 1930s. Nearby Bochum underwent a similar rate of growth, from a population of 1,500 in 1800 to 150,000 by the end of the 19th century, and doubling in size again over the next 30 years.

The industrial output of the region powered the development of newly unified Germany over the latter part of the 19th century. It did the same for a country recovering after WWI (it was occupied by the French in 1923 in an effort to ensure Germany met its reparation commitments) and was crucial in the re-armament of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The names of the pre-eminent industrialists, Krupp and Thyssen, are synonymous with that era. Accordingly, it was a huge target for Allied bombers in WWII and towns such as Oberhausen were razed to the ground.

But it didn’t take long for the area to recover and become the driving force behind the post war Wirtschaftswunder, the miracle on the Rhine, in the 1950s, when the combined population of the Ruhr exceeded six million. Since the 1960s the mines have steadily closed – the last one went a couple of years ago – and the area has had to deal with a period of declining prosperity.

Despite this the region is well worth a visit, not only to look at the fascinating industrial heritage to be seen at the Landschaftspark in Duisburg, the Zollverein coal mine in Essen or the Mining Museum in Bochum. The area is surprisingly green, with some spots of real beauty along the River Ruhr itself, in Essen-Werden and Mülheim an der Ruhr.

So if you want to understand modern Germany and how it developed, forget the castles and the princes, spend a bit of time in the Ruhrgebiet!

I have probably said it before, but am willing to say it again – and again: Germany is a paradise for ‘easy hikers’. Easy hikers, since you ask, are people like me who love the great outdoors but who prefer the crisp linen of a hotel bedroom to leaking tents, and a restaurant dinner, rounded off with one or two glasses of wine, to a cold can of baked beans. You sympathize? Then you may read on.

For novice ‘easy hikers’, I strongly recommend a trip to the Rhine. In terms of sheer value, of bang for your buck, a two-day or three-day hike from Koblenz southwards past the Loreley is hard to beat. Castles, vineyards, postcard views – this part of Germany really has it all.

Afterwards, relax for a few days in picturesque Bingen or the old Nibelungen capital of Worms (young Siegfried, Götterdämmerung and all that).

If, after your week in Germany, you do not ask yourself why the place is not literally flooded with tourists from all over the world, you may return to your barren wasteland of a Mediterranean holiday resort and your overpriced steak au poivre.

Intermediate ‘easy hikers’ should try out the Malerweg, literally the ‘Painters’ Route‘, a trail which, unsurprisingly, is strong on picturesque views. It was a source of inspiration for the romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich – his best known work, The Wanderer Above The Mist, gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect.

It was also inspirational for Karl May, Germany’s 19^th century ‘cowboy novelist’ who claimed to have been a famous trapper known as ‘Old Shatterhand’ all across North America. He was an impostor, of course: in truth, the cliffs and canyons of the local Elbsandsteingebirge (the so-called Saxon Switzerland) were the closest he ever got to the real Wild West.

Combine your trip with an excursion to Dresden, once the Florence of the Elbe, and reconstructed after the heavy bombings of WWII, or to Prague, little more than two hours away by train.

For the advanced ‘easy hiker’, I would suggest a trip to the Ruhr, Germany’s old industrial heartland north of Cologne. One word of warning, however: you will need to know where to go. If you simply walk up and down the high streets of the Ruhr’s major cities, chances are – let’s be honest – that you will not want to return, never ever.

Instead, you should leave the town centres behind you to stroll past amazingly picturesque industrial ruins, romantically dishevelled brownfield sites and landscapes that are slowly being reclaimed from man’s corrupting influence.

It’s nature – and Germany – but not as we know it.

Follow Michael’s tips on easy hiking on his website, on Facebook and Twitter.

All across Germany industry has branched out into tourism in specially built themed centres on the premises of, for example, Audi in Ingolstadt, BMW in Munich, and VW’s Autostadt in Wolfsburg. But western Germany has led the way in revamping actual old industrial infrastructure itself, and turning obsolete blast furnaces and coal mines into monuments to human endeavour. That culminated, in 2010, with the selection of the Ruhr area as European Capital of Culture, the first time an industrial region, rather than a city, had been chosen for that honour.

The Ruhr is nobody’s idea of a conventional tourist destination. A coal-rich region in western Germany, close to the Dutch border, it incorporates cities like Essen, Dortmund, Duisburg and Gelsenkirchen, with a combined population of over 5 million. By 1950 there were 156 coal mines in operation here, feeding a morass of steel mills and chemical plants, but then came globalization, and with it came harsh realities. When a ton of Australian coal cost half the price of a ton of German coal, the last of the Ruhr coal mines closed. Without cheap fuel, key segments of heavy industry become uneconomic.

The Ruhr’s attractions come, literally, in heaps and tons

But instead of shrugging their shoulders and letting their industrial dinosaurs rot away, the Ruhr’s regional governments have selected some and transformed them into cultural attractions, and linked them with an industrial heritage route.

Thus the giant Gasometer at Oberhausen – one of the largest in the world – has become an exhibition space, currently showing an exhibition about the planets.

Thus the former mill alongside the river port at Duisburg, part of a ravishing dockland development by our own Sir Norman Foster, houses the modern art collection of rich industrialists.

Thus the massive former blast furnace at Duisburg-Nord has become a ‘landscape park’, with climbing walls, mountain bike trails, and an after-dark light show by the lighting engineer for Pink Floyd.

Thus a slag heap has been turned into a ski slope, another gasometer has been filled with water to become a diving centre, and a former mining shaft has become an indoor sky-diving club. The Ruhr’s attractions come, literally, in heaps and tons.

The most dramatic of the conversions is Essen’s elegant Zeche Zollverein, once the world’s largest coal mine, which has been listed by UNESCO. Today Zollverein attracts a million visitors a year and is a fabulous venue and an example of what can be done with a mine if you’ve a cool €160 million of redevelopment money to spare.