Bavarian Forest National Park

Germany'S First National Park, Opened In 1970. With The Adjoining Sumava Park In Czechia It Forms The Largest Continuous Protected Forest In Central Europe, Run On A Deliberate Let It Be Policy That Has Left Whole Slopes Of Dead Spruce Standing · Neuschoenau, Bavaria

Germany's first national park was declared in 1970 along the Czech border, and with the Sumava park on the other side it makes the largest unbroken protected forest in central Europe. It is not a scenic park in the alpine sense: there are no great peaks and no turquoise lakes, just a rolling plateau of spruce and beech rising to around 1,450 metres, bogs, small dark streams, and a management policy that has made the place famous and argued about. When bark beetle killed the high spruce the park let it stand, and whole slopes of silver dead trees are now part of the landscape, with young forest growing up underneath them. For visitors the park is organised and genuinely family-friendly: two large visitor centres, a treetop walkway, and big enclosures where lynx, wolves, bison and owls can be seen reliably in a day when the wild animals cannot. Walkers get several hundred kilometres of marked trail, winter brings tracked cross-country skiing, and the whole thing costs nothing to enter.

Hans-Eisenmann-Haus visitor centre at Neuschoenau, with the second entrance at Ludwigsthal near Zwiesel, eastern Bavaria on the Czech border, Neuschoenau, Bavaria, Germany

The forest and its trails are open all the time and entry is free. The visitor centres at Neuschoenau and Ludwigsthal keep daily museum hours with a winter closing day in some seasons, and both normally shut for a short maintenance period in late autumn - check before making one of them the point of the trip. The animal enclosure paths are open daylight hours year round, and the enclosures are the part worth timing: mornings, and feeding times posted at the gate. The treetop walkway charges admission and runs its own hours, closing in high wind or ice. The Igelbus shuttle network that links car parks to trailheads runs mainly in the warm season and on a reduced winter timetable; confirm it rather than assuming, because several trailheads have small car parks that fill by mid-morning in August.

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