Hunsrück-Hochwald
Germany's newest national park — quartzite crags, hanging bogs, and a Celtic rampart on the beech-dark roof of the Hunsrück.
Opened at Whitsun 2015 across the Rhineland-Palatinate–Saarland border, Hunsrück-Hochwald is the youngest German national park and the quietest of them: the high, wet, beech-covered spine of the Hunsrück, a region that emptied for a century as its farmers emigrated and its slate and agate mines closed. The park runs along the Hochwald ridge under the Erbeskopf — at 816 metres the highest summit in Rhineland-Palatinate — where hard Taunus quartzite breaks the forest in crag lines and block screes, the pale rock rivers left over from ice-age frost shattering.
Its rarest habitats are the Hangbrücher — hanging bogs fed by slope water rather than springs, moss-brown terraces of peat that the foresters of earlier centuries ditched and drained. The park is methodically plugging those ditches, and the rewetted bogs are resuming their slow work; boardwalks cross the best of them near the Erbeskopf. The forest itself is old-school Hunsrück: beech in every age class, deadwood accumulating, wildcats denning in the root plates — this range was one of the species' last German refuges long before the park existed, and the Wildenburg gate keeps a walk-through enclosure for the unlucky-eyed.
People have used this ridge far longer than they have protected it: at the southern approach stands the Ringwall of Otzenhausen, a Celtic rampart of the Treveri piled ten metres high in places — one of the mightiest Iron Age fortifications north of the Alps, with a reconstructed Celtic village below it.
What's worth knowing before you go
This is the least public-transport-friendly of the German parks: Idar-Oberstein and Türkismühle are the nearest rail heads, buses are school-timetable sparse, and most visitors drive to the gates at the Erbeskopf (Hunsrückhaus), Wildenburg near Kempfeld, or Otzenhausen. The Erbeskopf doubles as a modest winter-sports hill; the marked "Traumschleifen" loop trails off the Saar-Hunsrück-Steig are the best day formats.
Come in October, when the beech turns and morning inversions drown the valleys so the ridge rides above a fog sea — then walk a Hangbruch boardwalk early, when the moss still holds the night's frost.