In the heart of the Black Forest
Hotel FederWERK stands in St. Georgen, in the central Black Forest, at 800 to 1,000 metres above sea level. From here the region is easy to take in: the Triberg Waterfalls are 13 kilometres away, Rottweil 31, Europa-Park 80. Freiburg, Lake Constance and the Rhine Falls near Schaffhausen are each about an hour’s drive away.
That is the real advantage of this location: you are not staying on the edge of the region but right in the middle of it, and you can reach both sides of the range on the same day.
The Black Forest stretches some 160 kilometres from Pforzheim down to the High Rhine. St. Georgen lies roughly in the middle, up on the ridge. This is where the main European watershed runs: everything falling to the east flows through the Brigach into the Danube and on to the Black Sea, everything falling to the west through the Kinzig into the Rhine and on to the North Sea.
For you this above all means short journeys in both directions. To the west lies the Kinzig valley and beyond it Freiburg and Alsace, to the east the Baar, Donaueschingen and Lake Constance.
On the watershed
Black Forest
Dark fir forests, open uplands, deeply cut valleys. Hiking trails start right at the hotel; in winter there are cross-country tracks and lifts.
Cuckoo clocks, cherry gateau & the stories behind them
Three things about the Black Forest are known around the world, and all three have a kernel of truth.
The cuckoo clock really does come from here. In winter, when the farms were snowed in, farming families built clocks. That grew into an industry supplying markets as far away as America, and out of it in turn came the precision engineering that later produced record players and tape recorders in St. Georgen. Our house stands in that tradition too – it is a former clock factory.
Black Forest gateau is younger than most people think and owes everything to kirsch. A slice of the original is worth seeking out, ideally in Triberg.
The Bollenhut with its red pompoms strictly belongs to just three villages in the Gutach valley, not to the whole Black Forest. Red pompoms were worn by unmarried women, black ones by married women.
What makes this landscape special
The central Black Forest is greener and less rugged than the south and higher than the north. Typical of it are the broad uplands with scattered farmsteads, forest in between, and again and again a view across several ranges of hills.
At 800 to 1,000 metres the weather has a character of its own. In summer the nights stay pleasantly cool, in autumn the mist often sits in the valleys while the sun shines up here. In winter it snows while it rains down in the Rhine valley.
Part of it is what you can still hear here: capercaillie and black woodpecker live in these forests, and on clear evenings it is dark enough to see the Milky Way.
