Qualla: Reinhardswald

Reinhardswald: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sebastian Martin Dicke, CC BY-SA 4.0. Drive north to south through the Reinhardswald and you will cover about thirty-eight kilometres of narrow, largely empty road, much of it in the south running dead straight between the trees, and you will pass exactly one village. Gottsbüren sits in the middle of the forest; after that there is nothing until you come out the far side near Holzhausen. Over two hundred square kilometres of woodland, of which 183 form an unincorporated district with essentially no municipal population at all. This is the largest continuous forest in Hesse and one of the most thinly peopled corners of Germany, and the quiet in it is not an atmosphere. It is a demographic fact.

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Image: Sebastian Martin Dicke | CC BY-SA 4.0

Reinhardswald: A Plateau Tilted West

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pedelecs, CC BY-SA 3.0. Geologically the Reinhardswald is a great slab of Bunter sandstone, gently folded, rising from around 200 metres and leaning slowly westward. Its two high points barely separate themselves: the Staufenberg at 472.2 metres and the Gahrenberg at 472.1, both so thickly wooded that n...

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Image: Pedelecs | CC BY-SA 3.0

Reinhardswald: Two Versions of Count Reinhard

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sebastian Martin Dicke, CC BY-SA 4.0. Nobody knows where the name came from, so the countryside supplied explanations. Both surviving legends make Count Reinhard the villain, and both end with acorns. In the first, he is a gambler and a drinker who sits down one night with the Bishop of Paderborn, loses his money, w...

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Image: Sebastian Martin Dicke | CC BY-SA 4.0

Reinhardswald: The Emperor's Wood

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Thomas Robbin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The documented history is less colourful and more transactional. The Reinhardswald was once an imperial forest. Emperor Henry II gave the northern portion, between the Weser and the Diemel, to Helmarshausen Abbey, and the southern part went to the Bishopric of Paderborn. Landgrav...

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Image: Thomas Robbin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Reinhardswald: Hutewald

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Fiegle, CC BY-SA 3.0. Beech and oak dominate, and large stretches of the forest are Hutewald - wood pasture, where livestock grazed among widely spaced trees for centuries. Trees grown in the open put on bulk rather than height, and the oaks that survive from that regime are broad, low, hollow and eno...

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Image: Michael Fiegle | CC BY-SA 3.0

Reinhardswald: 241 Metres

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kersti, CC BY-SA 4.0. In early 2022 the Kassel regional council approved eighteen wind turbines in the Reinhardswald, each 241 metres tall, which would make it the largest wind farm in Hesse. The developers argue that the turbines go where the forest has already gone: storm damage, successive droughts...

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Image: Kersti | CC BY-SA 4.0