Oberhof
At 800 metres above the Thuringian Forest, Oberhof gets proper winters — the kind where snow lies from November to March and the temperature in January averages below freezing. That fact has shaped everything here: the bobsleigh track that hosted the world's first two-man championship in 1931, the ski tunnel that lets you carve turns in August, and a long tradition of athletes and aristocrats arriving by train to make use of the cold.
But the town has another, quieter side. The Rennsteig, Germany's most-walked long-distance trail, passes through, and the Rennsteiggarten holds more than 4,000 plant species at the summit of Pfanntalskopf. Oberhof earns its status as a year-round destination without much fanfare about it.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who return tend to time a visit around the World Cup biathlon races — the atmosphere on the course in January is unlike anything on a TV screen. Others come back in summer specifically for the Rennsteiggarten at its peak, and nearly everyone ends up at the Glasstube at least twice, watching a glassblower turn a rod into something recognisable.
Deals in Oberhof
Book directly at the providerHow Oberhof came to be
Oberhof first appears in records in 1470 as a roadside inn in the Thuringian Forest, sold by the Johanniter Commandery to the Counts of Gleichen. A hunting lodge followed in 1616, built by the Dukes of Weimar — but Croatian forces burned it to the ground in 1635 during the Thirty Years' War, leaving just eight people in the village six years later.
Recovery was slow and then sudden. Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, built a new hunting lodge in 1830, and the first paying guests arrived in 1861. The real turning point came in 1884 with the completion of the Brandleite Tunnel and a railway connection; four years later, princes from Berlin made the journey, the press followed, and a quiet forest settlement found itself on the map. Oberhof became an official climatic health resort in 1939 and a city in 1985.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summers are cool and short — July averages around 12–13°C — and annual rainfall is high at roughly 1,300 mm, so a waterproof layer is useful whatever month you visit. Snow covers the ground reliably from mid-November through late March, making winters genuinely wintry rather than merely grey.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.