A Czech mountain trickle becomes Germany's North Sea highway
As the Labe, the Elbe spills from Mount Violík at 1,386 metres in the Giant Mountains, then crosses Bohemia and Germany to meet the North Sea at Cuxhaven. Its 148,268-square-kilometre basin ranks twelfth in Europe—about two-thirds of it German, most of the rest Czech.
Major tributaries include the Vltava, Ohře, Saale, Havel, Mulde, and Schwarze Elster. Latin Albis and Germanic *albī simply meant river or riverbed—cognate with Norse and Swedish words for river—so the name is almost a generic that stuck. After Elbe Falls and the Bílé Labe junction, the stream grows into a Central European artery linking Prague's hinterland to Hamburg's tide.
Below the Giant Mountains the river enters Polabí, the land along the Elbe, passes Hradec Králové and Pardubice, then swings west. At Mělník the Vltava more than doubles its flow; upstream of that meeting the Vltava has actually run 434 kilometres against the Elbe's 294. Near Litoměřice the reddish Ohře joins, and the river, now some 140 metres wide, cuts through the basalt of the Central Bohemian Uplands before slipping through sandstone gorges into Germany, where it holds a northwesterly course to the sea.
Across the North German Plain it passes Dresden, Meissen, Torgau, Wittenberg, Dessau and Magdeburg, where a water bridge carries a canal and its barges over the river. Below the Geesthacht lock at kilometre 586 the water turns tidal, and in Hamburg it splits into branches, the Northern Elbe running past the Philharmonic hall and above the old Elbe Tunnel. Canals tie it to Berlin and Germany's industrial regions, and the Versailles treaty placed navigation under an international commission seated in Dresden. Because West German barges bound for Hamburg once had to cross East Germany, the Elbe Lateral Canal was dug to bypass it.
Source: Elbe
