Reichenbach is a village in the municipality of

Hornberg Hornberg is a town in the Ortenaukreis, in western Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated in the Black Forest, 35 km southeast of Offenburg, and 25 km northwest of Villingen-Schwenningen. Sons and daughters of the town * ( ...

in the

Black Forest The Black Forest (german: Schwarzwald ) is a large forested mountain range in the state of Baden-Württemberg in southwest Germany, bounded by the Rhine Valley to the west and south and close to the borders with France and Switzerland. It is t ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

. The territory of the town of Hornberg very small in comparison with its villages and restricted mainly to the valley bottom of the Gutach stream and the lower region of the Reichenbach valley. The village of Reichenbach covers the largest area in the municipality.

Geography and geology

Reichenbach is a

dispersed settlement A dispersed settlement, also known as a scattered settlement, is one of the main types of settlement patterns used by landscape historians to classify rural settlements found in England and other parts of the world. Typically, there are a numb ...

of around 650 inhabitants and covers the valleys east and west of Hornberg. In the east is the actual valley of the Reichenbach and those of the Schwanenbach, Schonenbächle and their

side valley Side valleys and tributary valleys are valleys whose brooks or rivers flow into greater ones. Upstream, the valleys can be classified in an increasing order which is equivalent to the usual orographic order: the tributaries are ordered from tho ...

s. In the west the Offenbach- und Frombach valleys and side valleys belong to Reichenbach. The highest elevation in Reichenbach is the Windkapf with a height of 928 metres above

Normalnull ("standard zero") or (short N. N. or NN ) is an outdated official vertical datum used in Germany. Elevations using this reference system were to be marked (“meters above standard zero”). has been replaced by (NHN). History In 187 ...

. The mountain range here consists mainly of

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained ( phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies under ...

. In the parish there are numerous woolsack rocks, of which the ''Igellochfelsen'' is the best known. In the eastern part of the parish, by the Fohrenbühl,

bunter sandstone The Buntsandstein (German for ''coloured'' or ''colourful sandstone'') or Bunter sandstone is a lithostratigraphic and allostratigraphic unit (a sequence of rock strata) in the subsurface of large parts of west and central Europe. The Buntsands ...

lies on top of the granite and was commercially quarried until the 1920s.

Literature

* Stadtverwaltung Hornberg (publ.): ''900 Jahre Hornberg'', Konkordia, Bühl aden 1993. {{Authority control Villages in Baden-Württemberg Former municipalities in Baden-Württemberg Ortenaukreis