St. Blasien is the kind of town that surprises you from a distance. You come down through spruce forest, round a bend, and there is a green copper dome of tremendous size standing over a small Black Forest town as if someone had mislaid a cathedral from a much bigger city. The dome belongs to the former Benedictine abbey church, and at roughly thirty-six metres across it is one of the largest church domes in Europe north of the Alps.
The abbey itself goes back to the early Middle Ages, a monastery founded in the Albtal in a clearing so remote that the monks had to make everything themselves. Over the centuries it became rich and powerful, and in 1768 a fire destroyed most of it. The abbot of the time chose to rebuild on a grand scale, with a French architect designing a neoclassical rotunda that was completed in 1783. Today the buildings house a well-known boarding school run by Jesuits, and the church is open to visitors; the interior is plain white and calm, which is a relief after the busy Baroque of so many Alpine churches.
The town sits at around 770 metres in a high valley, and it has long been a health resort, valued for its clean air and quiet. With about four thousand people it has enough shops, bakeries and cafes to make a proper coffee stop, and the square in front of the dome is a pleasant place to sit with a bike in sight.
The roads in and out are what you hope for in this region: climbing through dark forest, passing small reservoirs and meadows, with fast sweepers on the open stretches and tighter work near the valley floor. In winter they are often snowy, and ice lingers in the shade. Late spring and early autumn are the best times, when the forest is bright and the tourists are fewer.