Geography
The western and northern part of the Palatinate is densely forested and mountainous. The highest point is the Donnersberg (687 m) near Kirchheimbolanden. The Palatinate forest (Pfälzerwald), popular with hikers, covers more than a third of the region and is the largest contiguous forest in Germany.
The eastern part is lower and is a well-known wine region. The German Wine Route (Deutsche Weinstrasse) passes through the Palatinate wine region.
Most of the cities of the Palatinate (Ludwigshafen, Speyer, Landau, Frankenthal, Neustadt) lie in the Rhine Rift plain in the east of the region, near the Rhine River, which forms the eastern border of the Palatinate.
Traditionally, the Palatinate is divided into the regions of Anterior Palatinate (Vorderpfalz), West Palatinate (Westpfalz), North Palatinate (Nordpfalz), and South Palatinate (Südpfalz).
The following administrative districts and independent cities are part of the Palatinate:
Districts:
- Bad Dürkheim (DÜW)
- Donnersbergkreis (KIB)
- Germersheim (GER)
- Kaiserslautern (district) (KL)
- Kusel (KUS)
- Rhein-Pfalz-Kreis (RP)
- Südliche Weinstraße (SÜW)
- Südwestpfalz (PS)
Independent cities:
- Frankenthal(FT)
- Kaiserslautern (KL)
- Landau (LD)
- Ludwigshafen (LU)
- Neustadt an der Weinstraße (NW)
- Pirmasens (PS)
- Speyer (SP)
- Zweibrücken (ZW)
Read more about this topic: Palatinate (region)
Famous quotes containing the word geography:
“The California fever is not likely to take us off.... There is neither romance nor glory in digging for gold after the manner of the pictures in the geography of diamond washing in Brazil.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (18221893)
“Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)