Handpicked experience · Frankfurt
Frankfurt, Germany
A forest that was floated to Holland as ship timber, and a town living off rain that fell thousands of years ago and comes back up at seventy degrees.
Conifer country that supplied a foreign shipbuilding industry
Valley villages sited around moving timber to water
Thermal springs that have never needed heating
Roman bathing structures surviving beneath a modern town
A promenade, concert hall and parks built for a vanished season
Two entirely different landscapes in one day
A day trip south from Frankfurt into the Black Forest and on to Baden-Baden, the spa town on its western edge. Two things that look like scenery and are not: a forest that was an export industry, and a town built on water that has been coming out of the ground hot since before anyone was here to notice.
The dark spruce that gives the region its name was not left standing to be admired. For centuries the biggest, straightest trunks were felled, dragged to the rivers and lashed into rafts, then floated down the Rhine to the Dutch shipyards — timber for masts and hulls, moving north on the current.
The rafts were not small. Trunks were bound into sections and joined into trains that ran for hundreds of metres, crewed by men who lived aboard them for the journey and walked home afterwards. Whole valleys here were organised around cutting, moving and steering wood, which is why the villages sit where they do.
Under the town, springs deliver water at close to seventy degrees. It is rain that soaked into the hills a very long time ago, worked its way down until the rock heated it, and has been rising ever since through the same fractures.
The Romans got there first and built baths over the source; parts of their brickwork survive beneath the modern town and can be visited. The nineteenth-century bathhouse above them still runs a fixed sequence of hot rooms, steam, scrubbing and cold plunges, in a set order, which is very much not a swimming pool.
In the eighteen hundreds the town filled every season with aristocracy, composers and gamblers. A Russian novelist lost heavily at the tables here and turned the experience into a short book about compulsion, written fast, in part to clear what he owed.
That is why a small town at the edge of a forest has a colonnaded promenade, a concert hall and a park laid out for being seen walking in. The scale is deliberately larger than the population.
The forest section is winding roads, viewpoints and dense conifer, often cool and damp under the canopy even in summer. Baden-Baden is the opposite: open, formal, mild, and built for strolling. Doing both in a day gives you the contrast rather than the depth, which is the honest trade.
A long day out of Frankfurt with several hours of driving in total. Walking is moderate — viewpoints, a village or two and the town centre — on paths and pavements. Bathhouse visits, where taken, run to their own timetable and are arranged on site rather than as part of the touring.
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What the fare covers, and what to budget for separately.
The practical detail, and the answers people actually ask for.
Because of dense stands of spruce whose canopy closes overhead, which is what gave the region its name long before it was a holiday destination.
Shipbuilding in the Netherlands. Trunks were rafted down the Rhine as masts and hull timber, in trains that ran for hundreds of metres.
Men who lived aboard for the length of the journey downstream and made their own way home once the wood was delivered.
Close to seventy degrees at source, rising through fractures in the rock after a very long journey underground.
It fell as rain thousands of years ago, percolated deep enough to be heated, and has been returning to the surface ever since.
Yes. They built bathing complexes over the source, and parts of that construction survive under the modern town.
Because for a century it was where much of European society spent the summer, which paid for a promenade, a concert hall and formal parks.
A fixed circuit of heated rooms, steam, scrubbing and cold immersion taken in a set order, rather than a pool you swim lengths in.