Germany

Germany’s mountains sit almost entirely in one corner of the country. Only the Bavarian Alps and the Allgäu Alps, both hard against the Austrian border in the far south, are Alps in the geological sense: young, high and glacially carved. The Zugspitze, on the border above Garmisch-Partenkirchen, is the country’s high point at 2,962 metres. Everything else covered here, the Black Forest, the Bavarian Forest, Saxon Switzerland, and the Rhine and Mosel valleys, is older and lower ground: worn-down hills, a sandstone plateau and river gorges rather than peaks. None of it should be mistaken for the Alps, and none of it needs to be. Each has its own reason to visit.

The two Alpine regions

The Bavarian Alps run along the border east from Garmisch-Partenkirchen to Berchtesgaden and include Germany’s only national park inside the Alps. The Allgäu Alps, further west toward Lake Constance, are lower and grassier, with a character shaped as much by dairy farming as by climbing, and a curiosity in their turf-covered “grass mountains”.

The low ranges

North and west of the Alps, three low ranges cover very different ground. The Black Forest, in the far southwest, rises to the Feldberg at 1,493 metres in the south and the Hornisgrinde at 1,163 metres in the north, and is densely wooded and crossed by one of Germany’s oldest mountain railways. The Bavarian Forest, along the Czech border, holds Germany’s oldest national park, founded in 1970, and combines with the Bohemian Forest across the frontier to form one of Central Europe’s largest continuous forests. Saxon Switzerland, near Dresden, is not a mountain range in any conventional sense: it is a sandstone plateau eroded into towers and gorges, with its own strict, rope-not-bolt climbing tradition going back to the 19th century.

The wine valleys

The Rhine and Mosel valleys are not mountains at all. They are steep-sided river valleys, terraced with vineyards, included here because the slopes above both rivers carry two of Germany’s established long-distance footpaths, the Rheinsteig and the Moselsteig, both involving climbing and descending rather than flat towpath walking.

Getting around

Each region connects to the rail network in a different way. A cogwheel railway climbs from Garmisch-Partenkirchen into the high Zugspitze valley; a regional rail network, the Waldbahn, serves the Bavarian Forest from the hub at Zwiesel; a historic main line loops through the central Black Forest via spiral tunnels engineered in the 1870s; and ordinary intercity trains follow both the Rhine and the Mosel. Saxon Switzerland is reached from Dresden along the Elbe valley line, whose main station for the area is Bad Schandau, a few kilometres short of the Czech border; the line runs on to Děčín. A car adds flexibility away from these lines, but is rarely necessary to reach any of the six regions.