Sylt

Sylt was once part of the Jutland mainland, and people lived here by 3000 BC, when the Denghoog passage grave was built. The island in its present shape is only about 400 years old: storm floods tore away land again and again, and on 1 November 1436 a surge destroyed the village of Eidum, whose survivors founded Westerland further inland. In 1386 the island was divided between the Duke of Schleswig and the King of Denmark, and from 1435 all of it except List belonged to the Duchy of Schleswig; List stayed with the Danish crown.

In the 17th and 18th centuries whaling, fishing and oyster breeding made the islanders prosperous, and Keitum became the island's capital, where wealthy captains built their houses. Dunes drifting east threatened villages and fields, especially at Rantum, until marram grass was planted in the 18th century. Tourism began in the 19th century: Westerland became a seaside resort in 1855, received town rights fifty years later and replaced Keitum as the capital.

Sylt was a military outpost in the First World War. Visitors had come by boat from Højer, but when Højer became Danish in 1920, a rail causeway was built, and the Hindenburgdamm opened in 1927. In the 1950s and 1960s Kampen drew celebrities, and the island became a resort of the German jet set. In 2009 Westerland, Rantum and Sylt-Ost merged into a single municipality. The fight against erosion goes on: since 1972 tens of millions of cubic metres of sand have been pumped onto the beaches.

The old language of the island is Söl'ring, a dialect of insular North Frisian with elements of Danish, Dutch and English, while Listland in the north was traditionally Danish-speaking; village names still appear in Frisian and Danish forms. The Altfriesisches Haus and the Sylt Museum in Keitum keep the memory of the captains' island, with its thatched houses and seafaring families.

The great island custom is the Biikebrennen on 21 February, when bonfires are lit across North Frisia; its roots lie in pagan times, and its meaning has changed over the centuries. Beach culture has its own traditions: the Strandkorb, the roofed wicker beach chair, is rented by the day on the beaches, and Germany's first official nude-bathing beach opened on Sylt in 1920. The best-known groyne on the island, Buhne 16, gave its name to the local naturist beach; the groyne itself has since been removed.

Since the 1950s Sylt has also been a byword in Germany for wealth and glamour, centred on Kampen, and it is constantly in the media, both for its society life and for its exposed position in the North Sea and the land it loses to storm tides.

Sylt had 17,713 inhabitants in 2014 — about 17,700 — nearly half of them in Westerland. The population is far outnumbered by visitors in summer, and the island's economy is built almost entirely around them: shops, restaurants, services and trades are tailored to the needs of guests and of the people who let rooms and houses to them. Many wealthy Germans keep holiday homes here.

Coastal protection is a permanent part of island life. Dredgers pump sand and water onto the beaches, where bulldozers spread it, so that storms remove the artificial sand rather than the shore itself; the work costs around 10 million euros a year, paid by the federal and state governments and the EU. The dunes are nature reserves, the Wadden Sea to the east is a national park, and research stations, among them the Alfred Wegener Institute in List, study the sea and its wildlife.

Life follows the seasons: crowded beaches and late evenings in Kampen in summer, then quiet villages, storm warnings and the bonfires of February in winter. Most journeys to the mainland are made by train across the causeway.

Almost every restaurant on Sylt serves seafood, and the fish burger is something of a takeaway speciality. Nordseekrabben, the small brown shrimps of the North Sea, belong to the traditional cooking of Schleswig-Holstein's west coast.

Oysters have a long history here. Oyster breeding helped make the islanders prosperous in the 17th and 18th centuries, but the native European oyster that once lived in great numbers off Sylt died out around 1950 from overfishing. In the mid-1980s Pacific oysters were introduced and farmed between List and Kampen, and they have since spread well beyond the original beds.

At the other end of the scale, four of the island's restaurants held Michelin stars in 2025. Warming drinks suit the wind: the north's hot specialities include the Pharisäer, sweetened coffee with brown rum under a cap of whipped cream, and Tote Tante ('dead aunt'). In Westerland restaurants line Friedrichstraße, while Kampen's Strönwai is where the island goes for a drink.