Qualla: Borkum https://qualla.com/borkum en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:34 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/s/8/borkum-wk/hero-small.webp Qualla: Borkum https://qualla.com/borkum Borkum: Introduction https://qualla.com/borkum/ Photo credit User:Matthias Süßen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk through the old quarter of Borkum and you may pass a garden fenced not with wood or iron but with the jawbones of whales, arched into the salt wind like the ribs of some beached leviathan. They are relics of the eighteenth century, when this island at the mouth of the river Ems sent its men to Greenland to hunt bowhead whales, and a successful captain advertised his fortune in bone. One of them, Roelof Gerritsz Meyer, made forty-seven voyages north before his death in 1798. The whaling is long gone. The bones remain, and so does Borkum's strange double life as a wild edge of the Wadden Sea and a place people come to be healed.

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Image: User:Matthias Süßen | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/s/8/borkum-wk/u1s8-borkum-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Borkum: Once Two Islands https://qualla.com/borkum/ Photo credit Andreh123, CC BY 4.0. Borkum is the largest of the seven East Frisian Islands by area, roughly thirty-one square kilometres of dune and beach, yet for most of its history it was not one island but two. Westland and Ostland sat separated by a shallow channel until 1863, when natural drift and deliberat...

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Image: Andreh123 | CC BY 4.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/s/8/borkum-wk/u1s8-borkum-once-two-islands.mp3 0:06 2 full Borkum: The Cure in the Air https://qualla.com/borkum/ Photo credit Martina Nolte, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Far out in the North Sea, beyond the shelter of the mainland, Borkum catches the full force of the open ocean. The climate here is genuinely offshore, raw and bracing, and the air carries remarkably little pollen. In the nineteenth century, Germans came to believe that air like t...

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Image: Martina Nolte | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/s/8/borkum-wk/u1s8-borkum-the-cure-in-the-air.mp3 0:06 3 full Borkum: The Odd One Out https://qualla.com/borkum/ Photo credit Reinhard Dietrich, CC0. In a chain of car-free islands, Borkum breaks the rules. Along with Norderney it is one of only two East Frisian Islands that permit motor vehicles, though even here cars are kept out of the settlement's heart in summer and banned everywhere from nine at night until seven in the ...

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Image: Reinhard Dietrich | CC0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/s/8/borkum-wk/u1s8-borkum-the-odd-one-out.mp3 0:06 4 full Borkum: A Refuge with Rules https://qualla.com/borkum/ Photo credit Dietmar Rabich, CC BY-SA 4.0. Almost all of Borkum, save the town and the airfield, lies within the Lower Saxony Wadden Sea National Park and the wider Wadden Sea UNESCO World Heritage Site, the largest unbroken expanse of tidal flats on the planet. The island is sliced into three protection zones. The easter...

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Image: Dietmar Rabich | CC BY-SA 4.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/s/8/borkum-wk/u1s8-borkum-a-refuge-with-rules.mp3 0:06 5 full Borkum: Guarding the Mouth of the Ems https://qualla.com/borkum/ Photo credit Tola69, CC BY-SA 3.0. Borkum's position at the entrance to the Ems estuary made it a place that watched the water, and the Old Lighthouse, the Alter Leuchtturm, still stands as a memorial to that vigilance. Generations of pilots and merchants depended on islanders to guide vessels through the shifting...

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Image: Tola69 | CC BY-SA 3.0

]]> Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/u/1/s/8/borkum-wk/u1s8-borkum-guarding-the-mouth-of-the-ems.mp3 0:06 6 full