Rhine
The Rhine, Europe's busiest waterway from the Alps to the sea
The Rhine is the great commercial river of western Europe, carrying more freight than any other waterway on the continent. It rises among the glaciers of the Swiss Alps and runs north through six countries to the North Sea, linking the industrial heartlands of Switzerland, Germany, France and the Netherlands. Along its middle course it threads a famous valley of castles, vineyards and legend, while at its mouth it forms the largest port complex on Earth at Rotterdam.
The Rhine runs about 1,232 kilometers from its Alpine headwaters at Lake Toma to the sea. From the high mountains it tumbles into Lake Constance, drops over the powerful Rhine Falls, then settles into the broad Upper Rhine plain shared by France and Germany. Below Bonn it enters the romantic gorge of the Middle Rhine, cutting through slate hills past terraced vineyards and the rock of the Lorelei. Finally it splits into the great Rhine-Meuse delta in the Netherlands, much of it engineered land below sea level, before reaching the North Sea.
For the Romans the Rhine marked the empire's frontier, and ever since it has been both a boundary and a binding artery between France and the German lands. Industrial cities and chemical works crowd its banks, and decades of pollution once left it nearly dead before a determined international clean-up brought back the salmon. Today a dense traffic of barges carries coal, ore, oil and containers from Rotterdam deep into the continent, making the Rhine the backbone of European inland shipping.