The name predates the resort and belongs to the beach itself. A low ridge of moraine, three to five metres high, runs along this piece of coast and shelters the land behind it - a natural sea wall thrown up by a storm surge in the early fifteenth century. The Cistercians of nearby Doberan Abbey, who owned this shore, told it differently: the dam was raised in answer to their prayers during a storm, and so it was the holy dam, the Heiligendamm. That the geology is glacial and the timing is a storm surge does not make the name less useful. It is a coast that got a barrier it needed, and the barrier is the reason there is a promenade here at all.

What the duke commissioned was not a village but a composition. Carl Theodor Severin gave Heiligendamm a coherent neoclassical face: white, columned, symmetrical, laid out along the shore as if the Baltic were a formal garden. His great hall - the Kurhaus, built between 1814 and 1816 for receptions, dancing and dining - carries a Latin inscription inviting guests to enjoy themselves once the bathing is done. Behind and beside it came the villas, spaced along the promenade in the sequence people still call the Perlenkette, the string of pearls. Seen from the water on a bright day the effect is a single white line drawn between green woods and grey sea, which is where the other nickname comes from: the white town by the sea.

The clientele arrived quickly and stayed grand. Heiligendamm became one of the places European aristocracy went to be seen going, and German emperors were among its guests; Doberan itself became the summer residence of the Mecklenburg dukes, and the resort's fortunes and the court's ran together. Foreign visitors wrote it up. Charles James Apperley, the English sporting journalist who published as Nimrod, travelled through northern Germany to Heiligendamm in 1828 and left an account of it. From 1886 there was a steam railway - the narrow-gauge Molli - to carry guests up from Bad Doberan, and after 1910 on westward to the newer resorts along the coast. For a century the season here meant carriages, bathing machines, uniforms and a very short walk to the water.

East Germany had no use for an aristocratic spa and found another one for the buildings. From 1953 to 2000 the white town housed a School of Applied Arts, where something on the order of 1,500 students trained as designers in architecture and product design. It is an odd and rather appealing afterlife: neoclassical bathing pavilions full of young people learning to draw chairs. The buildings were used, which is better than being abandoned, but they were not maintained as a resort, and by the 1990s much of Heiligendamm had slid into visible decay - shuttered villas, sagging verandas, plaster coming off the famous white walls. The recovery took a decade of restoration. The Grand Hotel Heiligendamm opened as a five-star house in spring 2003.

Four years later the resort acquired the strangest chapter in its history. The G8 summit met at Heiligendamm from 6 to 8 June 2007, and securing a beachfront village for eight heads of government meant enclosing it: a barrier roughly thirteen kilometres long ringed the resort and ran out into the Baltic at either end, with protesters massed outside it and the leaders photographed on a terrace within. The historic Villa Perle was demolished during the preparations, then rebuilt - the reconstruction stood by 2010. Prosperity did not follow the summit. The Jagdfeld group's operating company filed for insolvency in February 2012, and in July 2013 the property was bought by Paul Morzynski, an auditor from Hanover. Roughly three hundred people live in Heiligendamm now. The pier still runs two hundred metres into the sea, which is the best place to stand to see the white line whole - the same view, more or less, that Vogel was selling in 1793.