By Ines Keane
The falls come first, and they’re the reason most people find Triberg at all. Water drops 163 metres over seven cascades through dense forest above the town — long promoted locally as Germany’s highest waterfall, though that title is genuinely disputed and other sources credit taller drops elsewhere in Bavaria. Whichever way that argument settles, it’s a long, working descent that you climb alongside rather than admire from below, not a single dramatic plunge.
The town’s other export is harder to date precisely, which is part of what makes it interesting. Cuckoo clocks became a serious trade in the small workshops scattered between Neustadt and Sankt Georgen by the mid-18th century, but who actually built the first one is genuinely disputed. One early account credits a Bohemian merchant’s influence around 1742; another names a maker called Franz Anton Ketterer, working in the 1730s. Historians have since worked out that Ketterer wasn’t even born until 1734, which rules out his own legend rather neatly. Nobody has replaced it with a confirmed alternative. The clock, in other words, arrived here before anyone thought to write down who made it.
Whatever the origin, the craft stuck. Small workshops around Triberg have kept the mechanical clockmaking tradition going for close to three centuries at this point, through a period from the 1850s onward when the clocks became a genuine export industry rather than a local curiosity. Walking the main street today, the range is wide — some shops sell mass-produced imports alongside genuinely hand-carved pieces, and the difference is usually obvious once you’re looking closely at the casework rather than the price tag.
Base yourself in Triberg itself for easy access to both the falls and the open-air clock museum trail, or stay further into the forest around Sankt Georgen if you want quieter roads and a closer look at where the workshops actually are. Either way, plan for a proper walk up alongside the falls — the path climbs steadily, and the best views are earned rather than handed to you at the car park.
Sephari doesn’t yet have sourced, checked profiles of individual clockmakers here — a region with this much disputed history deserves care before we put a name forward, and that work is still in progress.
Black Forest makers can find out what’s involved at /sell-with-sephari/