Freiburg: my new favourite European city

It’s young with its university, yet venerable with its medieval minster and old town; it’s as German as the Black Forest and eponymous cake, yet knowingly ironic, and it sits at high table of Europe with France and Switzerland both visible from viewing platforms at the top of celebrated hills, which can be reached on foot from the city centre. Best of all (if you have kids in tow), Freiburg is half-an-hour by train from the best theme park in Europe that few people north of Dover have ever heard of: Europa Park.  

The locals are proud and loyal, have been that way for centuries. It was they who paid for the construction of the munster bit by bit rather than relying on the benefaction of church, nobility or king. One of the few buildings to escape the British incendiary bombing of November 1944, with its Gothic gargoyles and awe-inspiring spires, the munster, in its resplendent square of municipal buildings that date back to the 16^th Century, is the historic and social centrepiece of the city. At sundown, it’s place to enjoy a takeaway Kalt Sophie – a crushed ice white-wine sorbet – and partake in a gentle perambulation, noting the quietly confident deep red colonnade of the trade and magistrate’s house, flanked by turrets, whose spires are whimsically tiled, or so it seems, with a Hansel and Gretel assortment of Smarties.

Freiburg (or Frieburg-im-Breisgau to give its full title) is a little big city. It’s easily walkable – a pleasure in fact – but it has the confidence and pedigree of a place twice its size. There is an ubiquitous ease, localised in the clear streams, known as Bächle, which run in rivulets down the sides of the streets in the old town. They are supplied by the Dreisam River and were historically a source of water for the city, which partly explains how clean and clear they are. A distinctive feature, they set the tone, and, as though from bygone days, you will often see children guiding small wooden boats tied to a string along their rippling surface. On a warm summer’s evening, the locals doff socks and shoes and dip their feet into the cool running water, some bringing with them specially designed low wooden tables as a perch for their glass of wine. So local superstition has it, should you ever fall into Bächle, you will end up marrying a Freiburger. Not an unappealing prospect all things considered, especially if you follow the example of my colleague – a Freiburger himself – and make your first date the Feierling Brewery, which with its leafy beer garden is comfortably the best place to wash down your first salt-encrusted pretzel of the holiday with a Maß litre of golden pilsner.

Such is the natural conclusion to many of the walks up in the hills of the Black Forest, which form the eastern boundary of the city. The ambitious rambler will take a combination of tram and bus to Schaunslandbahn and either walk up or take the cable car to the top of one of the prettiest hills in the Black Forest. Either way, it’s a 7km ascent through cooling pines to the summit of Schaunsland, whose viewing tower by common consent has the best panorama in the region – even better than the bald summit of Feldberg, the highest point in the Black Forest, which can be seen rising from a picturesque valley to the south-east. From the top it’s a glorious 16km descent back to Freiburg, along a deeply forested ridgeline. On the way down, I meet Lance making a cautious descent on the rocky path by mountain bike. Like many others, he has made Freiburg his home after moving away from the big city, in his case Cologne. He recommends a local swimming spot just out of town on the edge of the Dreisam, good for families.

But more pressing is my lunch-stop, a secret of the forest to those in the know, ‘a proper German place’ as my colleague describes it, found in a cleft of a valley with still 5km before I get to dip my feet in a Bächle. Restaurant Wald St Valentin is all understated class. You feel it in the unfussy but smart service, in its unreformed rusticity. While I am tempted by a menu of savoury pancakes, fresh pasta dishes, flammkuchen (Germany’s answer to pizza) and a variety of steak, with the heat of the trail still upon me, it’s actually a fresh salad with chanterelle mushrooms that I want (naturally), washed down with a Teutonic twist on Sangria.

There’s a chain of interlinking hills above Freiburg, all worth exploring. Right above the city, the Schlossburg is within easiest reach, especially if you choose to take the short funicular train on the fringes of the old town, before a climb to another spiralling viewing tower. A walk along the top brings you into immediate contact with the history of the Schlossburg. As the name suggests, there was once a castle that stood upon this hill, one built and variously besieged and rebuilt over the 17^th and 18^th centuries in the back-and-forth conflicts between France and Austria. It was finally blown up by the retreating French forces of Louis XV in a peace agreement that saw Louis arranging the marriage between his son, the Dauphin, and the archduchess of Austria, one Marie-Antoinette. Keep going and quickly you have the trails to yourself and other forest dreamers. Eventually you arrive at the next hill, Rosskopf, home to the wind turbines of the city and another breath of fresh air in a tower above the trees.

Whether it’s walking, biking or running through the forests and hills surrounding Freiburg, the effect is meditative. Up in the labyrinth of trails, when on your own it can feel like navigating through the channels of your mind. Symbolic truths reveal themselves: trust your instincts and even the narrowest, most overgrown path can lead you to where you where you were looking for, and sometimes bring you to a place you weren’t, and so much the better for it. If ever you’re in doubt, take the higher path. It’s always reassuring to be at once in a city and able to look beyond it too. From the balcony of our top floor apartment to the east of the city, we would gaze out to the hills at the end of each day, the kids in bed, a glass of Reisling in hand, and zone out to the sounds of the city below: the ambulance sirens from the Red Cross building opposite (courteously quietened at night) and the low techno beats coming from a student party somewhere in the university quarter.

Wherever we go as a family, we try to imagine ourselves as locals for those few days. In Freiburg, that was most easily expressed by going to the local park – Zeepark – another gem of the city. My wife went so far as to name it a contender for best ever park and I can see her reasons. Undulating parkland encloses a huge swimming lake, at least 300m long and 150m wide, which is perfect for an everyday run & dip and getting in the summer dose of swimming for the kids. A bridge, resting on a series of giant buoys, spans its width and is the ideal spot for the young braves of the town to launch themselves into the water. Once over the other side, a statue of a naked Bacchus greets you at the foot of a sloping colonnade of vines. It’s as though he gives permission to follow his example. Soon I am struck by the sight of proud buttocks belonging to a man who stands astride a small grassy mound clutching only a smoking bifter for decency.

It's the young people who give Freiburg its verve. In the warm summer evenings, they come to Zeepark to play a medley of communal games. Germans seem to do wholesome fun very well, their collective mind more coherent than that of the UK and a least one of the theories behind their infuriating success in too many football world cup victories to count. They, too, are negotiating the complexities of migration and the rise of right-wing populism, and in this intellectual centre of the country to acknowledge their Germanness is to do so with a touch of self-referential irony.

We discover as much on the day we climb to the top of Feldberg. On the bus from Titisee, a long and fine swimming lake a short train ride from Freiburg, we are at first curious to see so many young people on the bus dressed in traditional costume: the men in lusty lederhosen and the women in busty yet dainty dirndls. One girl plaits another’s hair and cans of pilsner are passed around the merry swaying company. We wonder if this is a wedding party we have chanced upon, or if it is de rigeur to dress up and so honour the highest point in the Black Forest.

Beer cans and bottles are already piled high at the bus stop upon arrival at the cable car, and we are still some way off midday. We disembark to the sound of oompah music floating across the alpine air and a brass band carries us up the gondola to the now anticipated viewing tower. A 360-degree balcony at the top gives views all the way over to France and Alsace to the west and to the Swiss and Austrian alps to the south. Unexpectedly, halfway up is a room dedicated to the process of making Black Forest ham with its secret recipe of herbs and spices – as we were told, pepper and plain air among them. From the tower a short up and down brings us to the summit proper and yet more traditionally garbed locals in various stages of inebriation. Someone has brought a speaker to keep the oompah vibe going and a group of young men have dropped their lederhosen to squeals of delight from their female counterparts. Even the senior folk are getting in on the action with successive rounds of schnapps.

In our diffidently British way, we sit as a family eating our pre-prepared cheese sandwiches.

Eventually one chap takes pity on us and offers the kids some sweets.

‘It’s only sugar you know,’ he says as if to convince us.

I seize the moment.

‘Is it always like this?’ I ask with a sweeping gesture at the Dionysian cavorting on the bald spot of dignified Feldberg.

The man laughs.

‘We only do this once a year.’

‘Once a year?’

‘Genau! You see today is St Laurentius’ Day. He is patron saint of shepherds and flocks, and his chapel is just by where you got the cable car. This is both very German and very un-German.’

He is half right. One moment it feels like we have landed by chance into the pages of a German pastoral, a place of sunlight and milkmaids laughing unawares above fertile valleys; the next I see naked male buttocks, beer, schnapps and a stereo bellowing tuba, trombone and trumpet. Whether ironic or sincere, both feel gloriously and oh so German. Poor old St Laurentius may not have approved. I later discover he met a martyr’s fate in Rome on 10^th August, 258AD. But if the memory of an obscure saint has been appropriated in the name of a good piss up on a hilltop once a year, then praise be for tradition.