The Black Forest: From Frankfurt to Zurich
When to go
May to early October. The Black Forest heights are cool even in summer, while the Rhine valley below can be hot. In winter the high roads carry snow, and German law requires winter tyres whenever the road is wintry. Spring and summer are the flower months on Mainau, and the Rhine Falls run fullest in early summer, with the snowmelt from the Alps. In December the Christmas markets open, and the town hall of Gengenbach becomes an Advent calendar.
The stops
Interactive map of the route on our site ›
- Frankfurtone night
Goethe was born here in 1749, and the family house near the Römerberg has been rebuilt as it was. From 1462 the city confined its Jews to a single walled lane, the Judengasse, where Mayer Amschel Rothschild grew up and founded the banking house; its foundations are shown in the Museum Judengasse, and the Jewish Museum fills a Rothschild palace on the river.
- Wormsstop on the way
With Speyer and Mainz, one of the three ShUM communities, the cradle of Ashkenazi Jewry, a World Heritage site since 2021. Rashi studied here in the eleventh century; the synagogue, first built in 1034, was burned in 1938 and rebuilt in 1961, and in the Heiliger Sand cemetery stand gravestones from the eleventh century. In 1521 Martin Luther refused to recant before the emperor in Worms.
- Heidelbergone night
The university, founded in 1386, is the oldest in Germany. The red sandstone castle above the river was wrecked by French armies at the end of the seventeenth century and left a romantic ruin; in its cellar stands the Great Tun, a wine barrel the size of a room.
- Speyerstop on the way
The Romanesque cathedral, a World Heritage site, holds the tombs of German emperors and kings. A few streets away, in the Judenhof, stand the walls of the medieval synagogue and a mikveh from the early twelfth century, still filled by groundwater, one of the oldest in Europe.
- Baden-Badenone night
A spa town since the Romans, one of the Great Spa Towns of Europe on the World Heritage list. The Friedrichsbad, opened in 1877, takes bathers through a fixed sequence of hot and cold rooms, and in the Kurhaus casino Dostoevsky lost heavily at roulette in 1867.
- Mummelseestop on the way
A small dark lake beside the Black Forest High Road, at the foot of the Hornisgrinde, the highest mountain of the northern Black Forest. It is named after the Mummeln, water nymphs who by legend live in its depths.
- All Saints Waterfallsstop on the way
The Allerheiligen falls drop in a series of steps through a narrow gorge, with wooden stairs beside them. Above stand the ruins of a monastery founded in the twelfth century and burned after lightning struck it in 1804.
- Gengenbachone night
A walled town of half-timbered houses in the Kinzig valley. In December the twenty-four windows of its town hall are opened one a day, and it is billed as the largest Advent calendar in the world.
- Tribergstop on the way
The Gutach river falls through the forest above the town in seven cascades, among the highest waterfalls in Germany. Triberg is a centre of the cuckoo clock, made in the Black Forest since the eighteenth century, and giant ones built into houses stand on the roads around it.
- Freiburg2 nights
Narrow water channels, the Bächle, run along the streets of the old town, and the saying goes that whoever steps into one will marry someone from Freiburg. The Gothic tower of the Minster, with its open stone lace spire, survived the bombing of 1944 that destroyed much of the old town around it.
- Schauinslandstop on the way
Freiburg’s own mountain, its name meaning look into the land. A cable car opened in 1930 climbs to near the top, and on a clear day the view runs over the Rhine plain to the Vosges and, far to the south, the Alps.
- Titiseestop on the way
A lake left by a glacier of the Ice Age, under the Feldberg, the highest mountain of the Black Forest. Rowing boats and pedal boats go out from the shore, and the lakeside street is lined with cuckoo clock shops.
- Konstanz2 nights
The Council of Constance, from 1414 to 1418, ended the schism of rival popes, and in 1417 it elected Martin V in the hall by the harbour now called the Konzil. The Czech reformer Jan Hus was burned here in 1415. At the harbour mouth the statue of Imperia, by Peter Lenk, turns slowly on its base.
- Mainaustop on the way
The flower island in Lake Constance, reached by a footbridge, with a baroque palace, an arboretum and a butterfly house. The Bernadotte family, related to the Swedish royal house, has run it since Count Lennart Bernadotte took it over in 1932.
- Rhine Fallsstop on the way
The Rhine drops about twenty-three metres over a width of some hundred and fifty, the largest plain waterfall in Europe. Boats take visitors to the rock in the middle of the falls, with stairs to its top.
- Zurichone night
In 1519 Huldrych Zwingli began preaching at the Grossmünster, and from its pulpit the Reformation spread across Switzerland. Across the river, the Fraumünster holds five stained-glass windows by Marc Chagall, set in 1970.
What it costs
Eighty dollars a night is the room. The car and the fuel are yours, and the German autobahns are free for cars. Switzerland is not: from Schaffhausen to Zurich you drive on Swiss motorways, which need a vignette, forty Swiss francs for the calendar year, bought online as an e-vignette before the border; a car rented in Germany will not have one. Ending in Zurich with a German car usually brings a one-way international fee from the rental company, so ask before you book. Parking in Heidelberg, Baden-Baden and Freiburg is in paid garages; the extras worth budgeting are the Friedrichsbad, the Triberg falls, the Schauinsland cable car and Mainau.
What to know
Three things. One: the Umweltzone. Several German cities on the route, Frankfurt among them, are low-emission zones that only cars with the green sticker on the windscreen may enter; rental cars registered in Germany carry it, but check. Two: the autobahn. Some stretches have no fixed speed limit, but the advised speed is 130, and many sections are limited by signs, often electronic ones that change with traffic and weather. Keep right, overtake only on the left, and look far back in the mirror before you pull out, because cars close in very fast. Three: Switzerland. The limits are 120 on motorways, 80 on roads and 50 in towns, cameras are everywhere, and Swiss speeding fines are among the heaviest in Europe; driving on a motorway without the vignette brings a fine on the spot.
Roads, tolls and rules
Germany and Switzerland drive on the right. From Frankfurt the route follows the Rhine plain south, and from Baden-Baden it climbs onto the Black Forest High Road, the B500, which runs along the ridge through forest and past lakes, with views over the Rhine to the Vosges. The roads down through the valleys are narrow and winding, with motorcyclists in numbers at weekends. The stretch from Baden-Baden to Freiburg is the most beautiful of the route, so it is split over two short days, with a night in Gengenbach in the Kinzig valley.
Travel The Black Forest: From Frankfurt to Zurich
The route on our site, with a room up to $80 every night.