Schluchsee

Schluchsee is the largest lake in the Black Forest, sitting at over nine hundred metres in the high southern reaches, and I will be upfront: it is a reservoir. It was dammed in the 1930s to feed a hydroelectric scheme, the water level is artificial, and there was a village down there once. None of this matters in the slightest once you are standing on the shore looking across a kilometre of cold dark water at a wall of spruce so dense and so steep it looks painted on. Lia said it looked Scandinavian. I said it looked like the inside of a cuckoo clock. We were both, I think, correct.

A lake the Germans take seriously

What I love about Schluchsee is the seriousness of the relationship the Germans have with it. This is not a lake for lounging. People come here to do the lake. There is a marked path that runs the full eighteen kilometres around the shoreline, and on any decent morning it is populated by walkers in proper boots moving at a brisk, purposeful clip, by cyclists, by trail runners, and — most impressively — by swimmers who treat the genuinely bracing water with the calm of people for whom discomfort is simply a phase to be passed through.

I swam. Once. Briefly. The water in the deeper sections rarely gets properly warm even in August, and the cold arrives as a kind of moral judgement. Lia, who is hardier than me about most things, stayed in long enough to make a point and then got out and pretended she could have stayed longer. A man of perhaps seventy did slow, methodical laps the entire time, parallel to the shore, as though the temperature were a rumour he’d chosen not to believe.

Boats, trains, and cake

There is a small passenger boat that does a circuit of the lake, and it is exactly the right way to be lazy here — you let the boat do the eighteen kilometres while you sit on the deck eating, inevitably, cake. This is the Black Forest, after all, and the local obligation to consume Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte — the cherry-and-kirsch gateau the region exported to the world and then quietly perfected at home — is one I took with the same seriousness the swimmers brought to the water.

The village of Schluchsee on the northern shore is modest, more practical than picturesque, built mostly to house the people who come for the lake. But the railway line that serves it is something special: the Dreiseenbahn, the Three Lakes Railway, climbs up through the forest from Titisee with the kind of gradients that make the engine work audibly hard, and the views down through the trees to the water below are worth the trip on their own. We took it up, walked half the lake, took the boat back, and ate cake at both ends. I can recommend the whole sequence without reservation.

When to go: July and August if you actually intend to swim, when the shallows near the village beaches warm to something tolerable. June and September are quieter and ideal for the shoreline walk. Winter brings cross-country skiing on the surrounding heights and a lake that often freezes solid enough to walk on, though I’d take local advice before testing that.