View from the Hippenseppenhof (in English "Hippenseppen Farm") to the Vogtsbauernhof (in English "Reeve’s Farm") in the Black Forest Open Air Museum, Gutach, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany
Some background information:
The Black Forest Open Air Museum (in German: "Schwarzwälder Freilichtmuseum Vogtsbauernhof") is an open-air museum located between Gutach and Hausach in the Black Forest. The museum is centred on the Vogtsbauernhof farmhouse dating from 1612, which was built on this site. Other buildings from the Black Forest have been dismantled, transported to the museum and reassembled. Since its opening in 1964, the museum has attracted more than 16 million visitors.
Altogether, there are six fully furnished farmhouses. Other buildings on the museum’s grounds include a day labourer's cottage, a mill, a sawmill, a hammer mill, a bake- and stillhouse, barns, stalls, a chapel, a storehouse and a life estate cottage. Around the buildings are farm animals and a herb garden with over 130 medicinal herbs. Furthermore, demonstrations of exhibitions illustrate the crafts, tools, customs, traditions, work and lifestyle of former times.
The oldest buildings are the Schloessle stately home from 1407, the storehouse from 1590 and the Hippenseppenhof farmhouse from 1599. When the museum was founded in 1964, it was the first pen-air museum in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. With more than 250,000 visitors a year, it claims to be the most visited open-air museum in Germany and even one of the most visited throughout Europe.
With its more than 2,300 residents, Gutach is a little community in the Central Black Forest region. The village was built around a castle from the year 1300, erected by the barons of Hornberg. Destroyed by troops from the city of Strasbourg in 1383, the castle’s ruins were finally demolished in 1703. Together with its neighbouring villages Kirnbach and Reichenbach, Gutach is considered as the home of the Bollenhut, a traditional formal headdress with distinctive woollen pompoms, which meanwhile has become one of the main symbols of the whole Black Forest Region.
The Black Forest (in German: "Schwarzwald") is a large forested low mountain range in south-west Germany, in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. It is bounded by the Rhine valley to the west and south and close to the borders with France and Switzerland. The Black Forest is the source of both the Danube and Neckar rivers. Its highest peak is the Feldberg with an elevation of 1,493 metres (4,898 feet) above sea level. The region is roughly oblong in shape, with a length of 160 kilometres (100 miles) and a width of up to 50 km (30 miles). It has an area of about 6,009 square kilometres (2,320 square miles).
There are two nature parks and one national park named after the Black Forest that cover the region: the Southern Black Forest Nature Park, the Central/Northern Black Forest Nature Park and the Black Forest National Park. The Southern Black Forest Nature Park comprises 394,000 hectare (973,595 acres) and is therefore Germany's largest nature park. It encloses the southern part of the Central Black Forest, the Southern Black Forest and adjacent areas. The Central/North Black Forest Nature Park covers 375,000 hectare (926,645 acres) and is thus the second-largest in Germany. It begins in the southern part of the Central Black Forest, bordering on the Southern Black Forest Nature Park and covers the rest of the Black Forest to the north. However, the Black Forest National Park, established in 2014, is the first national park in the whole state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. It lies completely within the Central/North Black Forest Nature Park between the cities of Freudenstadt and Baden-Baden and covers an area of 10,062 hectare (24,863 acres).
Historically, the area was known for forestry and the mining of ore deposits, but tourism has now become the primary industry, accounting for around 300,000 jobs. The Black Forest is mainly rural, with many scattered villages and a few large towns. Tradition and custom are celebrated in many places in the form of annual festivities. The main dialect spoken in the Black Forest area is Alemannic.
The forest is best known for its typical farmhouses with their sweeping half-hipped roofs (already mentioned above), its traditional costumes, the cuckoo clock and the Black Forest gnomes. Delicacies from this region are the Black Forest gâteau (resp. "Black Forest Cherry Cake"), the Black Forest ham and the Kirschwasser, a spirit made from cherries. The Black Forest is also known for its long tradition in gourmet cuisine. No fewer than 17 Michelin-starred restaurants are located in the region, among them two restaurants with three stars.
Traditional costumes are still sometimes worn today, usually at festive occasions. The appearance of such costumes varies from community to community, sometimes markedly. One of the best-known Black Forest costumes are those of the villages of Kirnbach, Reichenbach and Gutach im Kinzigtal with their characteristic Bollenhut headdress. Unmarried women wear the hats with red bobbles (resp. "Bollen") while married women wear the hats with black ones. Engaged women sometimes wear a bridal crown (a so-called "Schaeppel") before and on the day of their wedding. The largest examples from the town of St. Georgen weigh up to five kilograms.
The main industry of the Black Forest is tourism. There are around 140,000 direct full-time jobs in the tourist sector and around 35 million tourist overnight stays per year. In spring, summer and autumn an extensive network of hiking trails and mountain bike routes enable different groups of people to use the natural region. In winter, it is the various types of winter sport that come to the fore. There are several facilities for both downhill and Nordic skiing in many places.
