Bayerischer Wald
Germany's first national park — granite ridges on the Czech border where the dead spruce were left standing and a wilder forest grew up through them.
Opened in October 1970, the Bavarian Forest was Germany's first national park, and it remains the country's boldest. When storms and bark beetles began killing the mountain spruce wholesale in the 1980s and 90s, the park did the then-unthinkable and let them: "Natur Natur sein lassen" — let nature be nature — became its creed, whole hillsides went silver-grey with standing dead wood, and local fury ran to petitions and protest marches. Two generations on, a young, layered, self-sown forest is coming up through the skeletons, and the park has become the reference case cited in every European rewilding argument.
The mountains themselves are old and rounded — granite and gneiss along the Czech ridge, with the block-strewn summit of the Lusen (1,373 m) piled like a slag heap of pale boulders, the Rachel (1,453 m) cradling a dark cirque lake, and the Falkenstein country to the north-west added when the park doubled in 1997. Across the border lies the Šumava National Park, and together the two form the largest strictly protected forest landscape in Central Europe — the "Green Roof of Europe", where lynx crossed back into Bavaria decades before reintroduction became fashionable.
Down at Neuschönau the park runs a gentler introduction: the Tier-Freigelände, a vast walk-through enclosure where wolves, lynx, and bison stand in for the forest's returning ghosts, and the tree-top walk that corkscrews up its wooden egg-dome above the canopy.
What's worth knowing before you go
Grafenau, Spiegelau, and Zwiesel are the gateway towns; the little Waldbahn rail line reaches Zwiesel from Plattling and branches to Grafenau and Bayerisch Eisenstein, and the park's "Igelbus" shuttles cover the trailheads in season — this is one of the few German parks genuinely doable without a car. Summit weather turns fast; the Lusen boulder field is miserable in rain and wonderful at dawn, when the valley fog sits below the rock.
The connoisseur's move is to keep walking: from the Lusen or the Rachel the trails cross into Šumava at old smugglers' passes like Buchwald/Bučina, and the far side is emptier still. In winter the Bretterschachten trailhead grooms some of Bavaria's most reliable cross-country skiing.