Frankfurt City Forest

About this place

The Frankfurt City Forest spreads across the south of the city over roughly fifty-eight square kilometres, thirty-nine of them inside the municipal boundary, which makes it the largest inner-city forest in Germany. Its edges touch Sachsenhausen, Niederrad, Schwanheim and Oberrad, and it wraps around a large part of the airport. It is not a remote wilderness but an old working woodland that turned into the city's everyday back garden. The interesting history here is one of ownership rather than botany. Frankfurt bought the forest from Emperor Charles the Fourth in thirteen seventy-two, which made it the property of the town itself rather than of any prince, and a dispute with the Teutonic Knights over the same ground ran for about a century before a compromise settled it in fourteen eighty-four. Place names still record the earlier use: Oberschweinstiege remembers the pens where pigs were driven in to fatten on acorns and beech mast. On the ground you get a path network of around four hundred and fifty kilometres, nine ponds, six playgrounds, about sixteen hundred benches and twenty-five shelter huts. The land is flat, which makes it excellent for running and cycling and much less interesting if you came for views. The airport sits on the western edge and aircraft noise is loud there; the eastern side around the Goethe Tower is far quieter. Winter turns the tracks to mud and autumn is the best of it.