The best time to visit Germany

What a year in Germany looks like

Germany's weather is more continental than that of its western neighbours: warmer summers and colder winters than Britain or the Netherlands at similar latitudes. The south, in Bavaria and the Alpine foothills, treats snow as ordinary and runs serious ski areas, while the north around Hamburg gets sea wind and a flat coastal grey. The single biggest change through the year is daylight — June stays bright until close to ten at night, late December is dark by four in the afternoon — and the country's whole outdoor culture moves with it. Choose the season and you are really choosing whether life happens in the street or indoors.

The year, in windows

• April to May: Spring, when the beer gardens put their tables back out and the trees along the Rhine come back into leaf. April in particular flips between sun and shower several times a day, so the packing has to allow for both. Rooms are still easy to find and the university towns have not yet filled with tour groups. It is a good window for seeing cities at the pace their residents actually live at.
• June to August: Summer is when the country genuinely lives outside: beer gardens full every evening, people swimming in the Bavarian lakes, and an outdoor festival somewhere most weekends. In the Bavarian Alps the hiking trails are all open and the cable cars run a full timetable, which makes this the only practical window for high mountain walking. Some weeks get properly hot, and a lot of older buildings have no air conditioning, so a top-floor room can be uncomfortable. Trains on popular routes fill up, especially on Friday and Sunday.
• September to October: A shoulder that many people rate as the best of the year: still warm enough to sit outside at midday, with the river valleys turning colour through October and the grape harvest under way along the Mosel and the Rhine. Munich's big beer festival straddles late September into early October each year, so check the dates for your year — during it, city accommodation is full and tight for the whole run. Elsewhere the country is calm, and the autumn light on the old towns is the best of the year for photographs.
• Late November to December: The Christmas market season turns town squares across the country back into outdoor space in spite of the cold. Markets in the historic centres of cities like Nuremberg and Dresden are packed on weekends, and most run from late November until shortly before or after Christmas depending on the town — check each city's dates for your year, because they differ. Days are short and often grey, so the markets after dark become the main event rather than an evening add-on. It is the one cold season most visitors actively enjoy.
• January to March: The quietest stretch of the year in most cities: grey skies, short days, but museums and opera houses in full season. In the Bavarian Alps this is mid-winter, with snow usually deepest in February and the resorts running properly. The Rhineland carnival falls in late winter and its dates move from year to year, filling Cologne and Düsseldorf completely for a few days — look at the calendar before booking anything there. Elsewhere, expect cheap rooms and cities that belong entirely to the people who live in them.

The weeks to aim for

For a general trip, May into early June and the month of September strike the best balance: warm enough for beer gardens and a full day walking an old town, but not hot enough to make an un-airconditioned old building uncomfortable. If you want the most distinctly German atmosphere and do not mind the cold, the first two weeks of December give you the Christmas markets in full before the pre-holiday crush arrives. Anyone whose trip is about walking in the Bavarian Alps should stay inside July to September, when the cable cars and high trails are all running. Berlin is the exception to all of this and works in any month, because so much of what it offers is indoors.

The weeks to avoid

January into early March in the northern and western cities is where people are most often disappointed — not because the cold is unbearable, but because the sky stays flat grey for days on end and the short day gives you very little of the light the brochures promised. If your plan is walking old towns and taking photographs, accept that you get only a few good hours daily. The other week to think about is whichever one Munich's beer festival occupies: if you are not going to the festival, you are paying festival rates for a full city and getting nothing from it. Neither is a bad decision, but both cost you something specific.

What the season does to a data plan

Data use here follows the season closely. In summer you are outdoors all day, leaning on maps and live train times, and a large beer garden holding a few thousand people will slow noticeably in the early evening. During the Christmas market weeks the main square becomes the densest place in town at the same hour every evening, which makes both paying and finding your group slower than expected — agree a meeting point before you split up. In the southern ski areas the battery drops fast in cold air, and the deeper Alpine valleys have patches with no usable signal at all. German long-distance trains cross a lot of open countryside and tunnels, so a video call from a moving train stutters even on the main corridors; download what you need before departure.