Germany
The Black Forest is Europe’s most famous woodland. Bordered by the Rhine River and the Alps in the heart of Europe, the Black Forest is the land of Germanic legend and the fairytales of the Brothers Grimm. It is the forest of ‘once upon a time’, the fabled bedtime words heard every night by children around the world. It is also a place of hiking trails, waterfalls and thermal baths that attract hundreds of thousands of vacationers every summer.
The great forest region on the border of France and Germany has always been a frontier. Neanderthals may have hunted here fifty thousand years ago. Fought over for millennia by Germanic tribes and their many neighbors, the Black Forest has been the setting for much of German history and many of its folktales. Although heavily harvested over the ages, the core of the Black Forest has survived, though it is now recovering from the effects of several hurricanes in the 1990s.
The Black Forest is a thick woodland rich with a wide variety of hardwoods and pines and some of the best preserved wildlife areas left in Central Europe. The forest is crisscrossed with roads and paths connecting the fairytale towns, villages and farms that dot the area. Highlights of the forest include the Triberg Waterfalls, the Black Forest Open Air Museum and the hot thermal springs at Baden Baden.
The Black Forest while still somewhat pristine, is surrounded on all sides by some of the most densely populated regions of Europe. Vacationers descend on the forest from all sides during the warm months, especially on weekends in the summers. Web: www.blackforest-tourism.com (official website).
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