Going to a beach on the Med again this year? How nice. You can lie on some sand. Then maybe swim. Then lie on sand again. For a week.

Hmm. Fine, in its way, but a bit dull, isn’t it? Surely there must be some great summer holidays out there that are a little less predictable? And no, we don’t mean weird – skydiving in the Arctic or mountain-biking down Mont Blanc are not real holidays. We mean gorgeous, relaxing breaks that aren’t just another identikit beach resort.

Well, here they are. We’ve combed the Continent for fresh new holidays that you won’t find in the brochures. From castles in Bavaria to a lake house in Sweden, from farmstays in Italy to islands in Ireland, these are anything but the standard beach flop.

A LAKE HOUSE IN SWEDEN

Apart from saunas and Abba, this Swedish institution should be the country’s greatest contribution to world civilisation – but, for some bewildering reason, foreigners just don’t seem to get it. Come June, half the local population decamps to lakeside summerhouses for weeks of boating, fishing, barbecues and running wild in the pristine Scandinavian forests. It makes a superb family holiday, but hardly any visitors give it a go.

Perhaps it’s because we all think Sweden is permanently chilly. We’re wrong: June and July temperatures around Gothenburg are more or less the same as those in Brittany, and enough of us spend our holidays there. Or maybe it’s because lakeside houses aren’t the easiest things to rent: many Swedes have their own, and they aren’t going to let anyone else enjoy them through the prime summer months. But they can be found.

A great bet for beginners is Stenebynas (www.stenebynas. se), where four traditional summerhouses are spread around a 100-hectare estate jutting into Lake Ivag, 95 miles from Gothenburg. It’s run by the friendly Berger family, who’ve kept the place as pristine and natural as it was when they moved here 17 years ago. Catch your dinner of pike or perch from the lake (boats, canoes and kayaks are on hand), and gather some mushrooms to go with it from the vast local forests – the Bergers have created paths to help you find your way. Stenebynas has a timber sauna, tennis courts and a couple of Shetland ponies for little guests to ride around the shore. When you’ve had your fill of hunter-gathering, there just happens to be a rather splendid rural gourmet restaurant five minutes’ boat ride away, with local venison and elk on the menu (www.falkholt.se ). Bliss.

Prices start at £600 per week for a two-bedroom house sleeping four, rinsing to £900 for a seven-bedroom place sleeping nine. Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com ), SAS (0870 6072 7727, www.flysas.com ) and City Airline (0870 220 6835, www.cityairline.com ) fly to Gothenburg; it’s a two-hour drive to Stenebynas. You’ll find more lakeside summerhouses in Scandinavia at www.novasol.co.uk .

YOUR OWN BAVARIAN CASTLE

Announce you’re taking a summer holiday in Germany and people get a thoughtful expression on their faces, murmur, “That sounds . . . interesting”, then change the subject. More fool them. But if you must be the envy of your neighbours, try this: “We’re touring the castles of Bavaria – and staying in them.” That got a reaction, didn’t it?

It’s not hard to do. Many of the country’s prettiest fairy-tale Schlosses have joined the Culture & Castles association (www.culture-castles.de ), a collection of 33 castles, monasteries and manor houses across Germany. You could knit together a fine driving tour between any number of them, but our favourites are in the underrated rolling hills, vine-clad valleys and chocolate-box villages of Franconia, northern Bavaria.

Fly into Nuremberg, at the heart of castle country – a blood-drenched history of warring statelets does leave you with some awfully nice buildings – and scoot straight down to Schloss Sommersdorf (00 49-9805 91920), the real turreted, moated McCoy. It was built in the 14th century and knocked about a bit during the Thirty Years War, but is splendid now, with antique-furnished, oil-hung apartments from £75 per night.

Take a few days to absorb the romantic countryside – the courteous owner, Baron Manfred von Crailsheim, will point you to the best spots along the nearby Tauber valley, including the medieval marvel of Rothenburg. Then spin north to Bamberg and Schloss Oberau (957 3268), an art-nouveau pile with simpler, but still lovely, rooms for £45 a night. It’s in a peaceful, lake-strewn nature reserve, with excellent fishing if you fancy a break from all that sightseeing.

And finally, to Schloss Eichicht (36733 23458), a timbered, 14th-century, Hansel and Gretel castle, perched high above the River Saale. It was left in a state after the fall of the wall – the East German government wasn’t renowned for its sense of interior decor – but it has scrubbed up nicely after a revamp in 2002, and has three holiday apartments for £55, £62 or £82 a night. The Saale is gorgeous here, and the owners will lend you bicycles for long, mazy spins through the forest.

Fly to Nuremberg with Air Berlin (0871 500 0737, www.airberlin.com ) or Lufthansa (0870 837 7747, www.lufthansa.co.uk ).

A FARMSTAY IN ITALY

Agriturismo is a phenomenon in Italy. The theory is simple and seductive: take a family-owned working farm, preferably a centuries-old building surrounded by comely vine-clad hills; spruce up the spare room as a cosy B&B, or transform the old stable block into a characterful but comfy holiday apartment; and, hey presto, rural authenticity and comfort in one easy package.

Trouble is, it’s become so popular that Italy is now awash with places that call themselves agriturismi, but don’t necessarily live up to the ideal. Some are rundown farms that have tacked on a couple of ramshackle rooms; others have dropped the agri part of the deal altogether, and are now little more than (often charming) rural holiday homes.

One that’s squared the circle is I Mandorli (00 39-0742 78669, www.agriturismoimandorli.com ), in Umbria. Its 50 hectares are mainly olive groves, while the 18thand 19th-century main buildings house four apartments, all whitewashed walls, quarry-tiled floors and beamed ceilings. The agriculture is serious – fruit, vegetables and cereals, as well as olives – but the turismo side delivers as well, with a pool, excellent home cooking from Mama Wanda and a play area for children. They’re welcome to get to know the chickens, ducks and geese around the farm, too. In high season, apartments start at £275 a week; fly to Perugia with Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com ).

Also in Umbria, Madonna delle Grazie (00 39 0578 299822, www.madonnadellegrazie.it ) pulls off the same double act. It offers six rooms in an 18th-century farmhouse, each with its own terrace, and a wealth of great produce growing, bleating, quacking and buzzing outside it: olives (of course), vines, fruit, sheep, ducks, chickens, and bees. It’s all organic, and most of it is served up in the excellent restaurant. There’s a pool, a play area, archery and good riding from local stables, and the views across to Tuscany are terrific. Doubles start at £62 per night B&B, ot £89, half-board. Fly to Perugia (as above).

Finding other properties with the same blend of high standards and authenticity isn’t easy. A useful portal is www.agriturismo.com , which has 1,200 properties on offer, but you’ll have to scroll carefully to weed out the pretenders. Or try Agriturist (www.agriturist.it ), the 40-year-old national association – its website lists plenty of working farms, but the quality of accommodation is variable. If you want to play safe, it might be best to go through an operator: those with a good selection of agriturismi include Sunvil (020 8758 4722, www.sunvil.co.uk ) and Long Travel (01694 722193, www.long-travel.co.uk ).

SADDLES AND SPAS IN THE SOUTH TYROL

Here’s a neat combination: spend your mornings trotting and cantering through Alpine meadows, and your afternoons having massages and wraps to soothe away the inevitable muscular consequences. The South Tyrol is a perfect place to do it: superb riding country, with a great spa tradition (gouty Romans were using the sulphur springs hereabouts 2,000 years ago).

Despite the name, it’s in Italy, though most people speak German: Teutonic and romance might be an odd mix, but the happy result is that people look good and cook well, it’s clean and everything works. The backdrop, the towering Dolomites, is hard to beat, too.

Our pick of the hotels is the Post (00 39 0474 496127, www.posthotel.bz.it ), in Olang-Valdaora: a pleasingly old-school chalet-style place built in 1886, but with a state-of-the-art spa and sauna in the basement, and the South Tyrol’s largest riding stables attached. It even has a sevennight spa and riding package on offer this summer: from July 7 to 28, the price is £505pp, half-board (the dinner is five-course), including three hours of riding lessons, two massages with a thermo bolster (a hot neck wrap to combat riders’ neck ache), a body massage, a hot-oil massage, two mud packs and a facial. Oh, and cakes in the afternoon. If you need more riding to justify all that, full-day outings (with picnic) cost £48pp. Fly to Venice – Treviso is best, served by Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com ) – or to Innsbruck with British Airways (0870 850 9850, www.ba.com ).

There are lots more options for rides and rubs: check out the unusually good tourist-board site, www.suedtirol.info .

PADDLING THE DORDOGNE

Most old French hands will tell you to steer clear of the Dordogne in high summer: roads rammed with coaches, chateaux mobbed with tourists, prices to make you gibber.

It all looks rather different from a canoe, though. The river from Argentat to Beynac passes some tourist honeypots, sure, but there are no traffic jams, no crowds, just a few extra boats to bob around – and it also goes through parts of the area road-based travellers never reach. The Dordogne as it ought to be, then – as serene as it is scenic.

Bit hairy-chested, though, isn’t it? Nope. Okay, you’ve got to be able to swim 50 yards, and you’ll need a basic level of fitness, but you’re going with the current, and under normal river conditions, it’s a calm, easy ride, with one or two light rapids to liven things up – ideal beginners’ territory. For a lot of the time, you can lie back and let the river take you on a gentle sightseeing tour, gazing up at the limestone cliffs, drifting past the chateaux of La Treyne, Castelnaud and Beynac.

There are plenty of canoe-hire places along the river to set you up with appropriate boats and kit, advise on river conditions, provide an itinerary and book you into camp sites along the way – though if you fancy a night or two of luxury, there’s nothing to stop you sneaking off to a local inn. And, of course, they’ll pick you up from journey’s end.

Two of the biggest are Copeyre Canoe (00 33 5 65 37 33 51, www.copeyre.com ) and Safaraid (www.canoe-kayak-dordogne.com ). Both have lots of bases along the way, where you can pick up or drop off your boat, so you can set up as long or short a trip as you like, from two to eight days. Expect to pay £10-£13 per person per day, including kit and transport. Camp sites cost £3£7pp per night.

Fly to Bergerac, 30 miles from Beynac, with Flybe (0871 522 6100, www.flybe.com ) or Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com ).

A SECRET ISLAND IN CROATIA

If you’ve never heard of Cres, it’s not surprising. Hardly anybody has. While the southern Croatian coast has been colonised by Hollywood yachts and roaring Italian speedboats, this long, skinny island in the unfashionable northern Adriatic languishes in obscurity. Good thing too.

You don’t come to Cres for glamour, or even the beaches – they’re pretty, but it’s pebble-hopping all the way. You come for nature – specifically, the nature revealed by the pioneering Dr Goran Susic at his Eco Centre (www.supovi.hr ), set up to preserve and explain the unique 1,000-year-old chestnut, oak, pine, fig and walnut forests that cover the island. Susic and his team of volunteers have uncovered a network of walking trails that date back to the Roman occupation of Cres 2,000 years ago – and say what you like about the Romans, they knew a pretty vista when they saw one. Leading through abandoned villages, over ancient stone bridges and across remote peaks, the seven paths traverse a spectacular mountainous landscape, all the more lovely for being so unexpected. As Susic says, sounding slightly bemused: “Everyone comes to Croatia for beaches, but who needs them when there’s so much beauty inland?”

The centre is based in Beli, a gorgeous, red-roofed hilltop village that wouldn’t look out of place in Tuscany, and which used to have 2,000 inhabitants, but now has 20. Entrance is £3, and guided walks are available for £30 a day – well worth it for an introduction to the entrancing nature in the area, including the huge (10ft wingspan) griffon vultures.

Stay in Beli, at the friendly Pansion Tramontana (00 385 51 840519; doubles from £25, B&B), which does a terrific late-night dinner on the terrace. And if it’s just not a holiday without a dip or two, there’s a small diving school attached.

Fly to Rijeka with EasyJet (www.easyjet.com ), from Bristol or Luton. It’s a half-hour drive to Valbiska, for the short ferry crossing to Cres, and finally a 40-minute drive north to Beli.

CHIC CAMPING IN ANDALUSIA

A camp site in Spain? Bet you can smell the dodgy communal toilet block, overchlorinated pool and full English fry-ups already. Well, stop sniffing: the Hoopoe Yurt Hotel (www.yurthotel.com ) couldn’t be more different. For a start, there are just four of the handcrafted Mongolian tents, each set in a private meadow on Ed and Henrietta Hunt’s three-hectare site of olive groves and cork-oak forest. The pool is chlorine-free, the cooking (with local produce and ingredients from the kitchen garden) authentic and delicious. The best bit, though, is the yurts themselves: round and roomy, they’re individually decorated, but all have big, proper double beds, crisp linen, rich rugs and, yes, their own bathrooms, with hot showers and ecological loos.

It’s a coupley place, and most are happy to laze by the pool by day and drink cocktails in the pergola when the sun’s gone down. For anyone more active, there’s yoga on site, with good riding roundabout (£7 per hour), and the white villages of Andalusia are all around – the lovely town of Ronda perches atop its gorge just half an hour’s drive away.

Rates are £80 per night, B&B. Hoopoe is a 90-minute drive from Jerez, served by Ryanair (0871 246 0000, www.ryanair.com ); or two hours from Malaga, served by 17 airlines, including EasyJet (www.easyjet.com ), Monarch (0870 040 5040, www.flymonarch.com ) and Thomsonfly (0870 190 0737, www.thomsonfly.com ).

IRELAND’S ISLANDS

Europe doesn’t get much more remote than the dozens of islands scattered off the coast of Connemara. A wild landscape in a wild sea: there’s nothing between you and America but waves, birds and (admittedly) the odd spot of rain.

Not for the fainthearted, then, but a week or so touring here brings its own rewards.

For a start, while the rest of Ireland has been riding the Celtic tiger economy and modernising apace, things move more slowly here. Take isolated Inishturk, where the (strict Catholic) population of 87 still live off the vegetables they grow, the sheep and cattle they raise, and the fish they catch. Well, you have to be self-sufficient when heavy weather means you’re cut off from the mainland for 40 days each winter.

Then there’s the history of the place. Man has been here a while: local megalithic tombs, the oldest structures in Ireland, have been dated back to 2500BC. On Inishbofin, you’ll find Iron Age forts, monastic sites and a Cromwellian castle. You’ll also find a damn fine pub, in the bar of Day’s Hotel, where, on any given evening, a fair proportion of the 200 or so inhabitants might be making music and supping Guinness till all hours.

Most of all, though, there’s the landscape: all rugged green hills, mazy coastline and gorgeous beaches. Inishturk and Clare Island, in particular, are terrific walking country, with treks across the peaks to rocky cliffs, gorgeous beaches and coves that play host to wild seals.

You can explore some of the islands on your own, but ferry services can be erratic and accommodation hard to find. It’s easier to take a five-day tour with Connemara Safari (www.walkingconnemara.com ), which takes in all the above, as well as atmospheric Inish Shark – atmospheric because of the 1928 gale that drowned the entire male population, who were out fishing. The island was abandoned and, though the village is still there, nobody lives in it apart from birds and ghosts.

Trips, led by the archeologist Gerry MacCloskey, start at Clifden and cost €599 (£410) per person for five days, including boats, food and accommodation – lovely Abbeyglen Castle, on the mainland, to start and finish, more modest places on the islands. It’s hard walking, but hearty Irish food, shebeen fish lunches and wine-soaked picnics should fuel you on your way. Fly to Galway with Flybe (0871 522 6100, www.flybe.com ) or Aer Arann (www.aerarann.ie ). To hire a car from any of the above airports, try Car Rentals (www.carrentals.co.uk ), Holiday Autos (0870 400 4461, www.holidayautos.co.uk ) or Travelsupermarket (0845 345 5708, www.travelsupermarket.com ). Weekly inclusive rates start at £80-£120, depending on the country of rental

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