# Self-Guided Occupation Trail

Web page: https://guide.je/tours/self-guided-occupation-trail-geotourist-app

- **When:** Any day, by booking
- **Duration:** 1-2 hrs
- **Kind:** On foot
- **Run by:** Geotourist App
- **Book:** https://geotourist.com/tours/4088

> Follow Occupation Trails on the Geotourist app to explore the German bunkers, walls and tunnels that still ring Jersey's coast and interior.

The Channel Islands were the only part of the British Isles to be occupied by German forces in WW2. The Occupation has left an extraordinary legacy on Jersey, with hundreds of concrete bunkers, walls and tunnels ringing the coast and scattered across the island's interior. Visitors can download the Geotourist app to follow the Occupation Trails and explore that legacy for themselves.

The order for such an immense construction effort came directly from Hitler, who demanded that his much-prized Channel Islands be turned into impregnable fortresses. He insisted that Jersey become a centrepiece of the Atlantic Wall, Germany's steel and concrete belt of fortifications protecting Western Europe from an Allied invasion. Though never completed, fortification building in the Channel Islands drew in around one tenth of Germany's wartime construction effort, and the results can still be seen today. Most of these structures remain in place, some preserved and most derelict.