Harz National Park

Listen for a moment. Under the trees the air is cool and damp, and it smells of resin, wet moss and stone. Somewhere a stream runs over granite. Your boots press into a soft layer of needles and peat. This is the edge of Harz National Park, and from Bad Harzburg you can walk straight into it. The town ends, the slope begins, and within minutes the sound of traffic is gone.

The Harz is the highest mountain range in northern Germany. It rises out of a flat landscape of farms and plains, so it has always felt like an island. The national park covers the high central part of the range, roughly one tenth of the whole Harz. It is not one tidy rectangle. It stretches across two federal states, Lower Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt, and that detail carries a history of its own.

For most of the twentieth century, this forest was divided. The border between West Germany and East Germany ran through these hills, very close to Bad Harzburg. On one side lay the West. On the other lay a guarded zone of fences and watchtowers. When the border opened, two separate national parks grew up on either side. In 2006 they joined into one park. A forest that had once been split by a border became a single protected landscape.

Above everything stands the Brocken, the highest summit in the Harz, at about 1,141 metres. From many viewpoints near Bad Harzburg you can see its broad, rounded top. Often it sits inside cloud. The summit has a harsh climate, with strong wind, frequent fog and long winters. Scientists sometimes compare the conditions up there to places much farther north. Small plants grow there that you would not expect this far south in Europe.

Here is something many visitors do not know. During the Cold War, the Brocken summit was a closed military zone. East German and Soviet forces used it as a listening post, aimed at the West. Ordinary people could not climb their own highest mountain for decades. The summit opened to the public again in December 1989, just weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Thousands of walkers came up on foot that winter.

The mountain is also the home of Germany's most famous witch legend. Local folklore says that witches gather on the Brocken on Walpurgis Night, the night before the first of May, to dance with the devil. The poet Goethe used this legend in a famous scene of his play Faust. Today the towns of the Harz celebrate the night with costumes, fires and music. It is folklore, of course... but on a foggy evening, you may understand why the story lasted.

Now look at the trees around you. You may notice something surprising. On many slopes the old spruce forest is grey and bare, or the trees lie on the ground. Since about 2018, hot dry summers and the bark beetle, a tiny insect that breeds under the bark, have killed huge areas of spruce. For many visitors this is a shock. The forest looks damaged, almost burnt.

But the park follows a simple idea: let nature work. In most of the park, people do not clear the dead wood or replant in neat rows. The fallen trunks give shade and hold water. Young birch, rowan and beech grow up between them. Over time, a more mixed and natural forest will return. So the grey slopes you see are not the end of the forest. They are an early stage of a new one.

The park also has a quiet success story. The Eurasian lynx, a large wild cat with tufted ears, had disappeared from the Harz long ago. From the year 2000, the national park released lynx back into these mountains. The animals settled and raised young, and lynx from the Harz have since spread into nearby regions. You are very unlikely to see a wild one. They are shy and move at night. Near Bad Harzburg, however, a lynx enclosure lets visitors watch them more easily.

The rock under your feet tells an older story. Much of the high Harz is granite, a hard grey stone formed deep underground. Wind, ice and water broke it into cliffs and giant blocks. Some of these rock towers have names, and walkers use them as landmarks. On the paths you may step over roots twisted around granite boulders. In the wet hollows between the rocks, bogs have formed over thousands of years. They feel soft and spongy, and wooden boardwalks often lead across them.

Bad Harzburg itself sits at the foot of the Burgberg, a forested hill just outside the park boundary. In the eleventh century the emperor Henry the Fourth built a castle here, called the Harzburg, and the town takes its name from it. Only traces of the castle remain today. A cable car climbs the hill, and from the top paths lead deeper into the forest. Close by, a treetop walkway carries visitors among the crowns of the trees.

One more thing to watch for, on a misty day. If the sun is behind you and fog lies below, you may see your own shadow thrown onto the cloud, ringed with colour. This is called the Brocken spectre, because people described it on this mountain. It is a real optical effect, not a ghost. Still, it is easy to imagine how it fed the old stories of spirits on the heights.

So stand still for a moment before you go on. Feel how the temperature drops as the trees close in. Look at the light, broken into patches on the moss. Listen for woodpeckers, for water, for wind moving through the dead and living trunks. Every path from here leads into a forest that is slowly changing, year by year. When you walk back down toward the town, you carry a little of that change with you.