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Danube is the longest international river in Europe.
It flows trough Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, FR Yugoslavia, Romania,
Bulgaria, Moldavia and Ukraine. Its spring is in Schwarzwald ("the black
forest") and it mouths into the Black Sea. It is 2.850 km long, the navigable
part is 2.414 km.
Danube is in the center of the European network of
navigable inland waterways. After the Main-Danube connection was created,
Danube became a part of the trans-European waterway linking seaports at
the North Sea (Rotterdam, Amsterdam) and at the Black Sea (Constanca) -
3.505 km long. An example to show the great importance of the Rhine-Mine-Danube
waterway: the first attempt to connect Rhine and Danube was made as early
as in 793. Charlemagne, the Frankish emperor, started a canal construction
to link the two rivers. Works were soon suspended, but remnants of a canal,
near Graben in Bavaria, witness them. The idea came to life only 12 centuries
later.
There are also other ideas for linking Danube with
other rivers and trough them to other seas, e.g. Adriatic Sea, Aegean Sea.
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