What happened
The Herberge zum Löwen stands on the pass road below the Schönberg at Seelbach in the Black Forest, a timber-framed house under one long gable a few minutes' walk from the ruins of Hohengeroldseck castle. It is monument-protected, and a board fifty metres before it on the road from Biberach claims the title of Germany's oldest inn. The date behind that is 1231, the year the house is first named in a document, and the local paper has set the claim out more honestly than the board does: writing in August 2015, the Lahrer Zeitung noted that the 1231 is only the oldest surviving document, that Zum Riesen at Miltenberg and Zum Roten Bären in Freiburg claim the same title on evidence of their own, and that the historian Gerhard Finkbeiner settles for calling the Löwen one of the three oldest inns in Germany. The same piece dates the castle above it to the middle of the thirteenth century and the family that built it, the lords of Geroldseck, in the Ortenau from 1139. German Wikipedia records the house as closed. The last reopening anyone has published was in April 2009, when the Badische Zeitung reported that a Roman, Romeo Minervini, had answered an advertisement, asked the owner why the oldest inn in the country stood empty, and taken it on for Baden and Swabian cooking. No publisher traced names the year it last poured.
What is there now
Empty. The timber-framed house survives under monument protection above the pass road, and the roadside board still claims the oldest inn in Germany; we have traced no publisher naming a business trading there now.
Location recorded from Wikipedia (de) article coordinates for the Herberge zum Löwen at Seelbach-Schönberg.
Sources
- Wikipediade.wikipedia.org
- schwarzwaelder-bote.de
- badische-zeitung.de
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