Premium City Hiking Trails
Premium City Hiking Trails
Premium City Hiking Trails are trails in cities that include over the entire route a contiguous and balanced ratio of interesting urban and touristic sites and nature experiences both in and close to the city.
- What are Premium City Hiking Trails (.pdf, 1.598 KB)
We have adapted the logo for Premium City Hiking Trails to the Hiking certificate.
The old logo is valid until the subsequent certification.
Tourists and residents alike explore cities on foot
Tourists with a desire for active exercise, with a wide range of needs and the desire for flexible ways of organizing their visit are increasingly exploring cities on foot. Also locals are getting to know their city in a new way. Reflection on local and regional values, tourist behavior that shows an appreciation for resources, and demographic changes in society have led to a desire among hikers for hiking trails that are close to the city and logistically less complex, with recreational value in nature connected with cultural and urban experiences.
The urban area offers a wide range of possibilities for staging city hiking trails based on the history of the city, the development of urban areas, the haunts of well-known personalities, or the landscape.
Closed urban ensembles appreciated by tourists guarantee a high quality of experience in the city. Ranges of hills, rivers and streams, ramparts, city forests and parks, and cemeteries offer possibilities for dramaturgical planning of hikes in the city green. Viewpoints, monuments, individual historical buildings, revitalized historical industrial buildings, streams, ponds, springs, and solitary rock formations are highlights along the urban and peri-urban hiking trail. Close to public transport, furnished in a hiker-friendly way, and also marked within the city, a green city becomes an experience for the hiker.
Hiking through the city in premium quality
Premium City Hiking Trails are trails in cities, for which a usual hiking fitness is required. The layout, variety, and experience value of these trails are based on the experience and quality orientation of Premium Hiking Trails.
Certification as a Premium City Hiking Trail is carried out by the Deutsches Wanderinstitut e.V. Independent specialists collect a wide range of experience-relevant data for each kilometer. Each criterion considered is weighted differently according to its importance for the hiking experience. As for the Premiumwanderweg, these raw data relevant to the hiking experience are used both to calculate an experience profile of the hiking trail route, which is used as a measure of the density and characteristics of the experiences, and to calculate an overall score of the experience value of the City Hiking Trail.
After successful completion of the examination, the certification is awarded for a period of three years and then requires recertification.