GERMANY

Germany is a Western European country with a landscape of forests, rivers, mountain ranges and North Sea beaches. It has over 2 millennia of history. Berlin, its capital, is home to art and nightlife scenes, the Brandenburg Gate and many sites relating to WWII. The nation’s capital and largest city is Berlin and its financial centre is Frankfurt; the largest urban area is the Ruhr. Germany encompasses a wide variety of landscapes: the tall, sheer mountains of the south; the sandy, rolling plains of the north the forested hills of the urbanized west; and the plains of the agricultural east. The name Germany has long described not a particular place but the loose, fluid polity of Germanic-speaking peoples that held sway over much of western Europe north of the Alps for millennia. Germany is bounded at its extreme north on the Jutland peninsula by Denmark. East and west of the peninsula, the Baltic Sea and North Sea coasts, respectively, complete the northern border. To the west, Germany borders The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg; to the southwest it borders France.