FOLK TALE

Tangled up in myth and tradition, Germany's Black Forest once had a reputation for being as antiquated as its cuckoo clocks. But new woodland dwellers are cutting fresh tracks

- Christine Mortag

When the Romans pushed over the Alps 2,000 years ago into the forested mountain range running through Germany’s southwestern tip, they named it the silva nigra—black forest—after its moody glades of deciduous trees and firs.

In many ways, though, the Schwarzwald, as the Germans call it, isn't dark at all. From the terrace of the Romantik Hotel Spielweg in the Southern Black Forest, I gaze up at the white vapor trails left by planes crisscrossing a swatch of sky so vibrantly blue it could be an Yves Klein canvas. Below, the slopes undulate in gently rolling waves of intense green.

Chef Viktoria Fuchs at her family's Romantik Hotel Spielweg in Münstertal

In the popular imagination the Black Forest is a place of extra- ordinary natural beauty and the wooded realm of sinister fairy tales. But many contemporary German city dwellers often consider the 23,000-acre region an antiquated and provincial backwater, a place where oma and opa (granny and grandpa) go on their holidays to hike the marked trails, which run for about 15,000 miles.

A chandelier inside the Franz Keller winery near Freiberg