Titisee

Every piece of advice I received about Titisee told me to avoid it in July and August, and I received this advice from people who had clearly not taken their own advice at some earlier point in their lives. I went in late April, a week after the Easter crowds had thinned, and I found something that felt genuinely secret: a lake of extraordinary stillness at an altitude of 838 metres, surrounded by fir trees that came almost to the water’s edge, with a mist layer sitting on the surface that would not burn off until nearly nine in the morning. I walked the full circumference before breakfast — about four kilometres — on a path through forest so quiet that I could hear my own jacket moving.

The lake is the product of the Feldberg glacier — the ice sheet that covered this part of the Black Forest until roughly ten thousand years ago deposited enough material to dam the Gutach valley and create this basin of cold clear water. It is not a large lake, but its depth — up to 40 metres in places — and the darkness of the surrounding forest give it a quality of weight that purely scenic lakes rarely possess. The colour changes through the day: grey-green in morning mist, an almost implausible blue-green at noon when the firs are catching direct light, and something closer to pewter in overcast late afternoon. I sat on a log at the eastern shore for longer than I can account for, watching these shifts.

The town of Titisee-Neustadt has a commercial centre along the lakefront that is, in summer, approximately what you’d expect: souvenir shops, pedalo hire, ice cream queues, cuckoo clocks positioned in shop windows at the precise angle to catch the eye of someone walking past. I bought a jar of Black Forest honey and a piece of Kirschtorte from a bakery where the woman behind the counter had the resigned competence of someone in their busiest season, and both things were better than they needed to be. The Kirschtorte in particular — the cherries genuinely soaked in Kirschwasser rather than syrup, the cream applied without apology — confirmed a theory I’ve developed that the best food in tourist towns is always found in the places that have been there long enough to stop performing.

The Feldberg looms to the south — you can see the ski lift infrastructure from the lake’s western shore — and in clear weather the summit is visible, a bald rounded peak above the treeline. The relationship between lake and mountain gives Titisee a sense of topographic consequence that pure resort lakes lack. It is part of a landscape with altitude, direction, and weather, not merely a pretty feature in a tourist brochure.

When to go: April and May for stillness and the first warmth before crowds arrive. October for autumn colour on the surrounding beeches and the lake at its most atmospheric. Avoid July and August unless you genuinely enjoy the energy of a popular resort in full summer; if you do, arrive before 8am and the early hours are yours.