Black Forest

The Black Forest divides naturally in two. The northern and central section, from Baden-Baden down to around Freudenstadt, is the gentler half: rolling, densely wooded ridges cut by narrow valleys and small spa and clockmaking towns. The southern half, toward the Swiss border, is higher and starker, rising to the Feldberg at 1,493 metres, the highest point in the Black Forest and the highest anywhere in Germany outside Bavaria and the Alps.

Baden-Baden and Calw

Baden-Baden, at the range’s northern edge, has been a spa town since Roman times: the emperor Caracalla is said to have bathed in its thermal springs in the third century, and the modern Caracalla Therme takes his name. It is one of three German towns, with Bad Kissingen and Bad Ems, recognised by UNESCO in 2021 among the “Great Spa Towns of Europe”. Further south, Calw, on the edge of the forest, is the birthplace of the novelist Hermann Hesse, born there in 1877; the town’s half-timbered old quarter has changed comparatively little since.

Triberg and the Schwarzwaldbahn

Triberg, in the central Black Forest, is best known for its waterfalls, which drop 163 metres in a series of stages and are widely promoted as Germany’s highest, although the multi-stage Röthbachfall near the Königssee in the Alps is taller. The town sits on the Schwarzwaldbahn, a railway engineered by Robert Gerwig and completed in 1873 between Offenburg and Singen. To climb 650 metres without excessive gradients, Gerwig routed the line through 39 tunnels, several looped back on themselves inside the hillside, a design later used as a model for mountain railways elsewhere in Europe. The surrounding district was also the historic centre of Black Forest clockmaking: by 1808 the Triberg and Neustadt areas counted nearly 700 clockmakers between them, and the trade’s main teaching workshop, founded in nearby Furtwangen in 1850, now houses the German Clock Museum.

Feldberg and the south

Titisee, at 845 metres, is the usual base for the southern Black Forest and sits close under the Feldberg, whose summit plateau is open grassland rather than forest, unusual in a range that is otherwise almost continuously wooded. Freiburg im Breisgau, larger and with better rail connections, lies at the range’s southwestern edge and works as an alternative base with easier access to the rest of the region.