We’d love to hear from you. What are your experiences on the continental divide? What do you think about this website or the map? You can leave comments, suggestions or questions anonymously on our discussion board.
Please Note: We aim to store no personal data on this website. Please do not post any personally identifiable information in your comments.
Fab
The continental divide follows the France-Spain border for a long stretch. There is one point where this map feels wrong: where the Garonne river crosses the France-Spain border. The Garonne has its source in Spain and empties in the Atlantic in France, near Bordeaux, and the Val d’Aran region in Spain is therefore on the Atlantic side of the divide.
The suggested correction is: the continental divide should leave the France-Spain border at the point where the France-Spain border and the border between the Spanish communities of Aragón and Catalunya meet, then follow the Aragón – Catalunya border for a while. Then, cross the road N-230 at some point of the Vielha Tunnel, then, turn northwards at about the Coll d’Amitges, cross the road C-28 at the port de la Bonaigua, cross the road C-142-B near the Uelh deth Garona (the source of the Garonne), and rejoin the France-Spain border near the Tuc der Òme peak.
Apart from that, congratulation. The site is valuable and well done.
menasheh.fogel
Cool, nice observation. I’m in the middle of updating the map to include Slovenia. I’d like to head to the mountains there next summer and wanted a little more detail. I’ll have a look at the point along the France and Spain borders against the underlying data from the agency from which I based that section and include in the update. Thanks for the feedback!
(p.s. I hid your email address. I’m trying to keep the personal data on the site to a minimum. Hope that’s okay!)
menasheh.fogel
Thanks again for the comments. I have updated both the online version and the download version with the correction. I went back and looked at the original datasource. The data was provided by the Confederación Hidrográfica del Ebro, responsible for the Ebro river basin. In this file, one feature was corrupted, so I chose an aggregated version at the time. I reimported this source without that feature and updated, so that the Garonne source is now correctly on the Atlantic side of the divide. Please have a look at the map now:
https://continental-divide.eu/map/map.html#11/42.7185/0.7728
Richard Rath
Hi Menasheh,
great website. I have been thinking about planning and hiking the Baltic Sea-North Sea-Divide and had quite some trouble to find the best information about the course of the divide. Now i find out that somebody else has done the job AND i can use it. THANK YOU.
Since you wrote that you have hiked quite some parts of this divide. Wouldn´t it be nice to post the trails you (or other) hiked? At least the nice ones;)
BR
Richard – from Berlin
menasheh.fogel
Thanks for your positive feedback, I’m glad you find the site useful! In my experience, there are very few trails – at least in the flatlands of Germany – that run precisely on the divide. However, along more defined ridge lines such as that on the Czech and Polish border, there is often a good, marked trail. Sadly, however, the trail usually does not mention the fact that it lies on the divide. I would encourage you to look at the Thunderforest Outdoor layer of the map. Here you can find a trail that is pretty close to the divide, so you can plan your route. If this trail is marked with a line and colored points (blue or purple) in the TF map, there are usually physical trail markings on trees and posts along the trail. Sometimes the TF layer also depicts a name of the trail, but these are only on much higher frequented routes. If enough individuals think the sharing of routes would be helpful here, I could think of a way to make posts on the website of trails that go along the divide. Best, Menasheh
Richard Rath
By the way: Can you tell how long the courses are, especially the the Baltic Sea-North Sea-Divide?
menasheh.fogel
If you have the ability to open up the map with a GIS program, the GIS creates a set of ‘Derived’ fields for each feature, including the feature length in meters. You can see the derived fields by clicking on Get Info within the GIS. With your question, I just checked this in my version of QGIS on the feature NSOS001 for example, which is the section of the Baltic Sea-North Sea divide running on the Czech Border with Poland (roughly from Międzylesie to Zittau). The length reported is 366.7 km for this section, which I assume would be accurate. In the web version of the map, you can click on the section of the divide for feature information. I can probably expose this derived field here so that you could see the length for each section, but I’ll need to look into that enhancement.
menasheh.fogel
Thanks again for your suggestion. I’ve updated the map to include the length of each section of the various divides. You can find this by clicking on the feature in the web version of the map. In answer to your question, the length of the North Sea-Baltic Sea divide from Mount Klepáč through Germany, Denmark and along the Norwegien/Swedish border to Lake Skarddørssjøan is 4044 km. Happy trails! I’ll be curious to know if you make it. I’ve also summarized the length of each divide on the about-divides page.
KathiG
Hi there! We knew we are living close to the most southern point of the European divide in Austria, but we had no idea of how it continues from here. So thank you for the insights from the map! Greetings from Lichtenstein (Austria)
menasheh.fogel
My pleasure, I’m glad you like it. Happy wandering!
Patrick Poendl
Hi Menasheh,
thank you so much for putting in the work to collect and process the European Divide data and to create this website. I have been looking for a something like this for quite some time.
My wife and I thru-hiked the Continental Divide Trail in the U.S. in 2015 and then rode our bicycles from the Arctic Ocean (Alaska) to Tierra del Fuego (Argentina) from 2015-2019, spending much of the time close to the Continental Divide of the Americas because this guaranteed spectacular landscapes most of the time. Ever since, the concept of major divides as been fascinating to me, and I look for them whenever doing road trips back home in Germany, sometimes spending way too much time trying to spot them on topo maps just for the fun of it.
During our multi-year trip, it has become a fun task to figure out with the limited computer equipment we had with us where exactly the Divide would be, where it coincided with international borders or state / regional borders, where the most beautiful passes would be. Unfortunately, I was not aware of the hydrosheds.org data I now found through you, or if it was available back then, which would have made things easier 🙂 But, since I am still processing thousands of photos from the trip, I now realize that we crossed the divide more often than I was aware of.
Since returning home at the end of 2019, I regularly started looking for European Divide data, to hopefully come up with hiking / cycling routes along the divides in Germany and Europe. Your website is an awesome resource which will be of great use in the future. Thank you!
Patrick Poendl, Berchtesgaden
menasheh.fogel
Dear Patrick,
Thank you for all your kind words and encouragement! A biking trip from Alaska to Argentina sounds like an incredible experience.
It is definitely a dream to create something like the Continental Divide Trail here in Europe. When I first started the project, I was actually quite surprised that no one had established a counterpart in Europe, much less document where the divides actually are. The map here is a launching point for those who would like to walk the divide. The next step in this dream, would be to actually find the best trails and mark them. In the Alps, there are portions of the divide which are just unnavigable for a normal hiker, so I imagine there would be a trail that would more go in the general direction, with occasional crossings over passes. I do believe there are some main ridge trails through the alps already existing. In other areas, like the flats of Brandenburg for example, this will all be new territory.
One note about your comment, where the divide makes up national borders. I was actually also surprised, that these features do make up borders throughout Europe, where the divide is following country borders for long sections. It’s not always exactly the same, but many times the divide is right along the border. I once hiked at the tripoint (Baltic, Black and North Seas) at Klepac. Here, there is a very good trail maintained as a border trail between Poland and Czech Republic. It’s not marked as such, but it goes along the divide directly.
Happy trails on your journeys!
Best,
Menasheh
Angélique
Hi Richard,
I just read your comment, I am planning to hike along the hiking the Baltic Sea-North Sea-Divide in 2024, actually not the German or Danish part but hike on the Sweden and Norwegian sections. Have you been hiking on the Baltic Sea-North Sea Divide that is Norway/Sweden? I would be curious to know more about your experience :).
Thijs
Hi Menasheh,
I started mapping the European water divides as well over a year ago. It was only a couple of months ago that I found your website. I have mapped the water divide around the North Sea from France (Calais) up to Germany. I am planning on first walking the North Sea-Atlantic Ocean watershed. I’m also really looking forward to walking the Vosges and the Jura mountains, you can follow the mountainridges quite nicely over there. Walking the other watersheds may become a lifelong project, I have the time.
I really liked reading your motivation and experiences so far.
Regards,
Thijs
menasheh.fogel
Dear Thijs, Thanks for your encouraging words, I’m glad you enjoy the site. Let me know how your travels go along the divide. Best, Menasheh