Schwarzwald

Baden-Württemberg got its first national park on New Year's Day 2014, and got it the hard way: years of petitions, sawmill-town protest, and "Lieber ohne" (better without) placards preceded the state law, making the Schwarzwald the most argued-over park in German history. What the argument was about is the high northern Black Forest between the Murg and Rench valleys — two blocks of mountain forest around the Ruhestein and the Hoher Ochsenkopf, linked by the Schwarzwaldhochstraße ridge road — on cool, rain-soaked bunter sandstone plateaus that grow spruce, fir, and beech and hold snow into April.

The park's kernel is older than the idea of national parks in Germany: the Wilder See cirque under the Seekopf was banned to axes in 1911, the state's first strict forest reserve, and a century of self-willed growth there shows what the rest is now permitted to become. Up on the ridges lie the grinden — bald, heathery plateau tops created by centuries of rough grazing — kept deliberately open as habitat and as the park's best viewpoints, while storm Lothar's 1999 throw zones (crossed by the Lotharpfad boardwalk) demonstrate what happens when windthrow is simply left: not catastrophe but a slow, jumbled, many-species forest. The totem bird is the capercaillie, whose dwindling leks are the reason winter visitors are corralled onto marked routes.

At the Ruhestein, the 2021 national park centre — a spectacular pile of skewed timber bars, shingled like the Black Forest farmhouses it quotes — is worth the trip in itself.

What's worth knowing before you go

Baiersbronn and Freudenstadt are the rail-served eastern gateways, Achern and Ottenhöfen the western; buses run the Schwarzwaldhochstraße to the Ruhestein in season. The Wildsee-blick loop from the Ruhestein over the Seekopf is the essential short walk; the Lotharpfad and the grinden paths at the Schliffkopf extend it into a full ridge day. Baiersbronn below holds an implausible density of starred kitchens for a logging valley — the standard reward move.

Go midweek: Stuttgart and Strasbourg both day-trip here heavily. The connoisseur's hour is dawn at the Wilder See overlook in autumn, fog pooled on the lake, before the first bus reaches the Ruhestein — and in snow, the same rim on snowshoes along the marked winter corridor.