The Black Forest makes an ideal walking and outdoor destination. Villages and towns are dotted along little rivers, surrounded by farmland, while the rolling foothills on the western fringes are draped in vineyards and orchards. To them, the tall dark firs seemed sinister, gloomy and ominous.īut 2000 years of agro-forestry have created a beautiful checkered landscape, where large and small patches of forest give way to open mountain pastures and upland moors. The Romans were scared of forests and saw danger lurking behind every tree.
The very name Black Forest conjures up an image of a gloomy, forbidding wilderness, which was probably quite near the mark at the time the Romans gave it its name: ‘Silva Negra’, which literally means ‘Black Forest’ in Latin. In the west, the mountains rise abruptly from the Rhine Valley, while in the east they slope much more gradually towards the Swabian Jura and the Danube Valley. In the north, its furthest outposts are Karlsruhe and Pforzheim. The River Rhine, which wraps halfway around these mountains, forms the border between Germany and France to the west, with Switzerland to the south. Located in the far southwest corner of Germany, in the county of Baden-Württemberg, it covers an area about two-thirds the size of Wales. The Black Forest is classified as a Mittelgebirge (a mid-size mountain range) with the highest peaks reaching just under 1500m, making it the largest and highest Mittelgebirge in Germany.
