Bavarian Forest

The Bavarian Forest National Park was established on 7 October 1970, the first national park in Germany. Since a 1997 extension it has covered about 243 square kilometres along the Czech border, run under a deliberately hands-off policy that lets storm damage, bark beetle outbreaks and windfall run their course rather than being cleared. Across the border, the park adjoins the Czech Šumava National Park, and together the two protected areas form one of the largest continuous forests in Central Europe.

A low, rounded range

Only part of the wider Bavarian Forest lies inside the national park, and all of it is old, heavily eroded upland rather than anything resembling the Alps: rounded ridges, dense spruce and beech, and summits that rarely feel dramatic from below. The highest point of the whole range is the Großer Arber, at 1,456 metres, though it lies north of the national park in a separate nature reserve. Inside the park itself, the Großer Rachel, at 1,452 metres, is the high point, with the smaller Großer Falkenstein nearby at 1,315 metres. The Rachelsee, a small lake below the Rachel’s summit, was carved out by a glacier during the last ice age, one of several such lakes in the range.

What the forest allows

The hands-off management means visitors see standing dead timber and dense young regrowth alongside untouched old forest, a landscape some find bleak and others find wild, closer to the park’s intent than a manicured version would be. Wildlife includes lynx, reintroduced to the area after dying out across Central Europe, along with red deer, otters and a range of woodpecker species that depend on dead wood for nesting. The Hans-Eisenmann-Haus, near the village of Neuschönau, is the main visitor centre and starting point for a marked network of trails, including a treetop walkway that gives a view over the canopy without needing to climb anything.

Getting there

Zwiesel, on the Bayerische Waldbahn network, is the main rail hub for the region; branch lines run on from there to Bodenmais, Grafenau and Bayerisch Eisenstein, all useful bases for reaching different parts of the park on foot. The national park’s Hans-Eisenmann-Haus has an Igelbus stop of its own, Nationalparkzentrum Lusen.