Selva Negra

Black Forest National Park was created in 2014 in the north of the massif, across the districts of Rastatt, Freudenstadt, Ortenau and Calw, and protects some 101 km². It was the first national park in Baden-Württemberg and the sixteenth in Germany, and its creation was the subject of intense political and public debate in the region.

The territory is organised in two separate sectors around the Schwarzwaldhochstraße scenic road, and includes spruce and fir woods, beech woods, crags, glacial cirques with small lakes and the grinden, semi-natural upland heaths historically maintained by grazing. It also preserves raised bogs, a scarce and very sensitive habitat.

The management principle is free development: over most of the park intervention has been renounced, letting the forest develop without exploitation, with deadwood accumulating and regeneration taking its course. That approach, uncommon in a country with such an intensive forestry tradition, is precisely the park's argument: to have an area where the workings of central European woodland without management can be observed. It is home to capercaillie, in a delicate state in the Black Forest, and a community of birds and insects tied to old wood.