The best gravel rides around Duckow

The Malchiner See is not a noisy bathing paradise, but a retreat. Its shores are lined with dense reed belts that offer protection to many animals. With a little luck and patience, you can observe beavers, otters, or even white-tailed eagles and ospreys. In winter, large flocks of ducks and other water birds gather here.

Basedow is closely linked to the von Hahn noble family, who had been based here since the 13th century and extensively redesigned the castle and the village in the 19th century (including by the architect Friedrich August Stüler and the landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné, who laid out the large landscape park from around 1835). The ensemble of castle, village, and park has been a listed monument since 1985.

Whether you watch the mist rising over the lake in the reeds in the morning, enjoy the vastness from the observation tower in the afternoon, or watch the white-tailed eagle circling the shore in the evening – the area around Malchiner See offers peace, beauty, and the feeling of having discovered something special.

Under the Bassewitz-Levetzow family in the 1860s/70s, the current layout of the estate was created. It incorporates the church into the urban design and deviates from older patterns (no isolated manor house in the park, but a close connection between the residential and economic areas around a rectangular courtyard). Many farm buildings show individual historicist designs (often Neo-Renaissance gables) and partly originate from Georg Daniel, who also restored the church. The taller buildings are made of light yellow brick on fieldstone bases, others of red brick.

Schorssow, idyllically situated on the southwestern shore of Lake Malchin and directly on the smaller Haussee in Mecklenburg Switzerland, looks back on a varied and centuries-old estate history. The village was shaped above all by important Mecklenburg noble families, feuds, and its striking manor house.

A special treat is the circular tour around the Malchiner See (approx. 26–33 km, depending on the variant). The route leads along quiet paths, through avenues of old oaks and chestnut trees, past meadows and small villages. Again and again, views of the lake and the hilly landscape open up.

The lake is shallow – on average only about two meters deep, and at one sandbar even only knee-deep – and is ideal for quiet canoe or paddle tours.

It is considered the only medieval chapel in Mecklenburg in its original structure (culturally and historically significant, as Gessin is not its own church village). Furthermore, it belongs to the Mecklenburger Kapellenweg, a pilgrimage and hiking trail of about 32–36 km in the Mecklenburg Switzerland region. It connects eight old places of worship from the 13th/14th century (or their locations). Most of the original chapels were destroyed in the Thirty Years' War or sacrificed from around 1755 onwards for the economic interests of the landowners.