🇩🇪 Germany · South (Bavaria and the Black Forest)
The Black Forest is one of those regions that look as if they came out of a Brothers Grimm tale, and that is no accident: its dark fir woods, its valleys of farms with enormous roofs, its glacial lakes and its clockmaking villages inspired many of those legends. In southwest Germany, between the Rhine and the Danube, this wooded massif offers a Germany different from that of the big cities: green, rural, quiet, smelling of wood and cherry sponge, where time still seems to be measured by the tick of a cuckoo clock.
Here are the highest waterfalls in Germany, at Triberg; the postcard lakes Titisee and Schluchsee, ringed by forest; elegant Freiburg with its Gothic cathedral and its curious little water channels (the Bächle) running through the streets; and Baden-Baden, the spa town where nineteenth-century European aristocracy came to take the thermal waters, a luxury still alive today in its Roman-Irish baths. It is also the birthplace of the cuckoo clock and of the Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte, the famous Black Forest cake of chocolate, cream, cherries and kirsch brandy.
This guide covers the Black Forest with a practical eye: which villages and landscapes not to miss, how to get around by regional train and make the most of the free KONUS transport card, what the waterfalls and the thermal baths cost, where to really see the clockmaking craft (separating the tourist myth of the 'world's largest' clock from the genuine tradition), what to eat and how many days to give it. Ideal for combining with Alsace, with the Rhine Falls in Switzerland or with a route through southern Germany.
The history of the Black Forest is written in its woods and its water. The Romans were the first to leave a mark, drawn by the thermal springs of Aquae ('the waters'), today's Baden-Baden, where they built baths almost two thousand years ago. Through the Middle Ages, Benedictine and Cistercian monks colonised the valleys, cleared forest and founded abbeys such as St Blaise. The mountains then lived off silver mining and, above all, timber: enormous rafts of logs floated down the rivers to the Rhine and on to Holland, where they were used to build ships and cities. In the long winters, farming families began carving wooden clocks by the fire, and so in the eighteenth century was born the clockmaking industry that made the cuckoo clock world famous and laid the foundations of the later German precision industry. The Romanticism of the nineteenth century discovered these woods as a landscape of legend — the Brothers Grimm set several of their tales here — and spa tourism turned Baden-Baden into the bathing resort of aristocratic Europe. In the 1980s, acid rain caused the Waldsterben, the 'forest dieback', which devastated large stands of firs and set off environmental alarm bells; since then, reforestation and environmental policy have restored much of the forest's health. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Southern Germany: Bavaria and the Wittelsbach dynasty, with Ludwig II's fantasy castles; Munich, birthplace of Nazism but also of the White Rose resistance; Nuremberg, imperial city of the Nazi rallies and of the trials that condemned them; and the legendary Black Forest.
Read the history of South (Bavaria and the Black Forest) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of the Black Forest begins, literally, in hot water. When Rome's legions pushed north and occupied the southwest of present-day Germany in the first century AD, they found on the western edge of these woods springs of thermal water bubbling up at more than sixty degrees. The Romans, expert and devoted bathers, did not hesitate: they founded a spa station there and called it Aquae Aureliae or simply Aquae, 'the waters'. It is the origin of today's Baden-Baden, whose name — 'baths' — still proclaims that thousand-year-old vocation.
Bath buildings, roads and garrisons grew up around the springs. Beneath the modern town, remains of the Roman baths survive, among them those used by the soldiers. The hot water that still feeds the Friedrichsbad and the Caracalla Therme today is the same the legionaries sought almost two thousand years ago: a continuous thread linking the aristocratic Baden-Baden of the nineteenth century with the frontier of the Roman Empire.
The forest itself, by contrast, remained for centuries a dark and feared barrier. The Romans and, later, the Germanic peoples who occupied the region saw it as an inhospitable place of impenetrable thickets, full of wild animals and legends. That sombre character — firs so dense they barely let the light through — is what gave it its name: Schwarzwald, the 'Black Forest'. For a long time, the mountains were something you skirted, not something you lived in.
The human conquest of the Black Forest was, above all, the work of the Church. From the ninth and tenth centuries, and strongly in the high Middle Ages, Benedictine and then Cistercian monks pushed into the valleys to found monasteries and abbeys. Those religious were the great colonisers of the forest: they felled trees, drained land, cleared plots for cultivation and founded villages. Abbeys such as St Blaise (St. Blasien), in the heart of the Upper Black Forest, became economic and spiritual powers that organised the life of whole districts.
To the monastic effort was added mining. The mountains of the Black Forest hid veins of silver, lead and other metals, and from the Middle Ages mines were opened that drew population and wealth. Cities such as Freiburg im Breisgau, founded in 1120 by the dukes of Zähringen, prospered thanks to the silver from the nearby mines: it is no accident that the openwork tower of its magnificent Gothic cathedral, begun in the thirteenth century, was largely paid for with that metal. Mining marked the landscape, the language and the traditions of many valleys.
With the clearing and the settlements came the architecture that identifies the region today: the great Black Forest farmhouses (Schwarzwaldhof), with their enormous steeply pitched roofs that almost touch the ground, designed to bear the weight of snow and to shelter family, livestock, hay and tools under one roof. Those self-sufficient farms, isolated in the valleys through long winters, would be the cradle of another unexpected tradition.
If one resource defined the economy of the Black Forest for centuries, it was timber. The immense woods of tall, straight firs were a fortune standing up, but the problem was getting them out of valleys with no roads. The solution was as ingenious as it was spectacular: log floating. Woodcutters felled the trunks up in the heights and threw them into the mountain streams and rivers, using the current and the floods to carry them down the valley.
On the larger rivers, the logs were lashed together into enormous rafts that came down the Kinzig, the Murg and other tributaries to the Rhine. And on the Rhine, those giant timber rafts — some hundreds of metres long, steered by crews of raftsmen who lived on them for days — carried on downstream across the whole of Germany to the Netherlands. There, Black Forest timber had a prestigious destination: it was used to build the ships of the Dutch naval power and to drive the piles on which cities such as Amsterdam stand, built literally on German forest sunk into the mud.
The largest and most valuable trunks, destined precisely for Holland, were known as 'Holländer' (Dutchmen). For centuries this trade drove a whole economy of woodcutters, raftsmen, merchants and sawmills, and left a deep mark on the culture of the region. But intensive exploitation had its price too: large areas were deforested, and felling had to be regulated and replanting begun. The Black Forest's relationship with its trees — a source of wealth and, at the same time, a fragile heritage — is a long story of use and care that reaches to this day.
In the long, snowy winters, when the farms were cut off and work in the fields stopped, the farming families of the Black Forest looked for an occupation for their hands and an extra income. With the wood they had to hand and the carving skill they had inherited, they began making clocks. So, in the eighteenth century, Black Forest clockmaking was born: at first, rustic wooden clocks with painted faces; later, increasingly sophisticated mechanisms.
The absolute icon of that industry was the cuckoo clock, with its carved little house, its moving figures and the bird that pops out calling the hours. One myth is worth dispelling: the cuckoo clock is not a Swiss invention nor a rootless ornament, but a genuine tradition of these valleys, perfected here and exported to the whole world from the nineteenth century. Families, workshops and pedlars who criss-crossed Europe selling clocks made the Black Forest the great world centre of folk clockmaking. Towns such as Triberg, Schonach, Furtwangen and Neustadt lived from it.
That winter craft had an enormous historical consequence: it laid the foundations of the precision industry. The skill accumulated in making gears, springs and fine mechanisms turned, with industrialisation, into factories for clocks, measuring instruments and precision devices. The region and neighbouring Baden-Württemberg became a high-technology industrial hub. In Furtwangen, the German Clock Museum preserves that whole memory, from the humble wooden clock to contemporary engineering. The creativity born beside the fire in isolated farms ended up being one of the seeds of German industrial prestige.
The nineteenth century completely transformed the way the Black Forest was seen. What had for centuries been a feared, gloomy, dangerous wood suddenly became a Romantic ideal. The poets, painters and writers of German Romanticism found in these misty valleys, in their legends of nymphs and water spirits — such as the 'Mummeln' of the Mummelsee — and in their storybook atmosphere the perfect setting for their sensibility. The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who collected and published their famous tales at the start of the century, drew on this imaginary world of dark woods, lost cottages, witches and stray children; several of their stories breathe the air of these landscapes.
At the same time, the old thermal waters of Baden-Baden lived their golden age. The town became the most elegant and cosmopolitan spa in Europe, the continent's 'summer capital'. Russian tsars, Prussian aristocrats, bankers, writers such as Dostoevsky and Turgenev and all of European high society came to 'take the waters', to stroll along the Lichtentaler Allee, to gamble at the brand-new casino in the Kurhaus and to be seen in its salons. Sumptuous hotels, theatres and villas were built, and the town took on the stately air it keeps today.
That double discovery — the forest as Romantic landscape and the spa as social luxury — put the Black Forest on the map of European tourism. The first scenic roads were opened, such as the Schwarzwaldhochstrasse, walking routes were laid out and the railway reached the valleys with engineering works as remarkable as the Schwarzwaldbahn. The region began to live off its visitors too, a vocation that has only grown since.
In the 1980s, the Black Forest became the symbol of an ecological catastrophe that shook all of Germany: the Waldsterben, the 'forest dieback'. Sulphur dioxide emissions from coal plants, factories and traffic produced acid rain, which fell on the woods and acidified the soils, weakened the roots and made the firs lose their needles and dry out. Wide slopes of the Black Forest appeared with yellowing, bare, dying trees. The images of sick forests shocked public opinion.
The phenomenon had a profound political and cultural impact. For a country that felt the forest as part of its identity, watching the most emblematic of them all die was a wake-up call impossible to ignore. The Waldsterben gave a powerful push to the German environmental movement — the Green party grew in that context — and forced drastic measures: compulsory filters in power stations, catalytic converters in cars, limits on sulphur emissions and international agreements against cross-border pollution.
Those policies bore fruit. Over the following decades, the drastic reduction in sulphur emissions let the soils and trees begin to recover, and reforestation returned much of the forest to health, often with more varied and resilient species than the monotonous plantation fir. Today the Black Forest is green and vigorous again, though it faces new threats: the droughts and heatwaves linked to climate change, and the pests that take advantage of weakened trees. The story of the Waldsterben left a lesson the region does not forget: these woods, which gave timber, clocks, legends and tourism, are a living heritage that has to be looked after. Walking the Black Forest today means walking through a landscape that stood on the brink of collapse and knew how to recover.