Small icebergs bob on the waves. The beach is grey and frozen. To the north are the Dead Dunes, and to the south – past the Valley of Death – is the forested peninsula that marks the Russian border. Squeezed between a freshwater lagoon and the roaring Baltic Sea, the shifting sand beneath my feet has swallowed villages, occasionally spitting out bones from abandoned cemeteries. It is, perhaps, an unlikely destination for a winter holiday.
But everything about Lithuania’s Curonian Spit is unlikely, and this is the secret of its stark, unreal beauty. A 61-mile-long sandbar that arcs alongside the Baltic coast, half in Lithuania and half in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, its unique ecology has gained it Unesco world heritage site status. A landmass formed from enormous dunes that rose from the sea 5,000 years ago – legend says they were created by a giantess called Neringa – the spit became densely forested with birch, oak and pine.
