To the south of the Nahe is a lower, hilly country forming the near bulk of the Palatinate region and all of the, smaller, Saarland.

As the Hunsrück proceeds east it acquires north-south width and three notable gaps in its southern ridges.

Frankfurt-Hahn Airport is at the centre of the upland, equidistant between Mainz, Trier and Koblenz, co-named after the village of Hahn.

Its northeasternmost part is formed by the Soonwald (highest mountain: the Ellerspring, 656.8 m), the Lützelsoon (Womrather Höhe, 599.1 m) and the Bingen Forest (Kandrich, 638.6 m).

Geomorphologically the Hunsrück bears great similarities to the Eifel, the Taunus and the Westerwald, which are also part of the Rhenish Massif.

A Roman military road, the so-called Via Ausonia also once ran through the mountains in an east-west direction and linked Trier with Bingen.

("Moselle, Nahe, Saar and Rhine enclose our Hunsrück") The following table lists the highest mountains and hills of the Hunsrück by sub-range (Osburger and Schwarzwälder Hochwald, Idar Forest, Haardt Forest, Soonwald, Bingen Forest and Lützelsoon) and height in metres above sea level (NN): Despite, in places, intensive agricultural or timber use, the Hunsrück remains a landscape with a biodiversity, because many elements of the landscape can only be extensively utilised or even not used at all.

The traditional forest monocultures are increasingly giving way, especially as a result of windthrow damage, to mixed woods, supporting a greater variety of plant species.

It achieved notoriety when the presence of this rare species of bat delayed construction on the runway extension at Hahn Airport.

Meanwhile, in areas covered by dry grassland or scree, numerous reptiles like the slowworm and smooth snake have found a home.

In 2014, Late Palaeolithic rock carvings similar to those from southern France and Spain were found in the Hunsrück.

[6] The oldest witnesses from the New Stone Age are dated to no later than the Middle Neolithic, relics of the so-called Rössen culture (whose sites include Biebernheim and Reckershausen).

The majority of finds, especially of stone axes date, however, to the Late Neolithic and belong to the Michelsberg culture.

Due to the multitude of dominions, many castles and customs stations were built, mainly between 11th to mid 14th century, which still shape the landscape today.

After the Thirty Years' War, Louis XIV of France made reunification demands on several principalities in the Palatinate, the Hunsrück and the Eifel.

These, in turn, spurred the manufacture of implements for the house, farming and handicrafts: ovens, pans, boilers, weights, spades, nails, hammers, anvils, looms, spinning wheels and ammunition (cannonballs and shells weighing from 2 to 30 pounds).

He arrived in 1823, as a representative of Emperor Dom Pedro I of Brazil, and visited the Hanseatic cities, Frankfurt and many of the German courts.

The first immigrants from the Hunsrück settled in 1824 in what is now the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, near the city of São Leopoldo.

[11] The 1840s in Europe were marked by inflation, crop failures and a degree of social unrest, so that again (especially in 1846 and 1861) many people in Hunsrück decided to leave in two more waves of emigration, especially to North America and Brazil.

[14] As a result of the increasing neglect and deprivation of parts of the population in Germany during the era of industrialization, an Inner Mission association was founded at the initiative of the Simmern pastor, and later superintendent, Julius Reuss, in Simmern, with the aim of building a rescue centre in the Hunsrück for children living in poverty.

There, the first building was erected as a "mother house" (Mutterhaus or domus materna), which opened on 13 September 1851 with a householder and twelve boys.

After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/1871 and the foundation of the German Reich under Prussia's leadership, the so-called Gründerzeit began.

Its success did not impact the Hunsrück until later, which is why many job seekers and even entire families went looking for work in the Ruhr area and migrated there.

The Protestant pastor, later Prussian Landtag MP, Richard Oertel, founder of the Hunsrück Farmers' Union in 1892, and Albert Hackenberg, acting pastor in Hottenbach from 1879 to 1912, successfully worked to improve the economic, social and technological conditions in the Hunsrück region.

The First World War, the Occupation Period and inflation also had a serious impact on the economy of the Hunsrück and its inhabitants, but there were not the political tensions that arose in many places in the German Reich.

During the Cold War until the early 1990s, the Hunsrück was home to numerous military airfields, ammunition dumps, command positions and missile sites.

In 1986/87, as a result of the NATO Double-Track Decision, 96 cruise missiles, fitted with nuclear warheads, were to be stored at Pydna.

This did not happen, however, the Cold War ended two years later anyway, and the missile based was closed on 31 August 1993, the land being acquired by the Kastellaun garrison authority.

In 2012, Reitz returned to the Hunsrück for the shooting of his film Die andere Heimat - Chronik einer Sehnsucht in the village of Gehlweiler.

The German television drama series Heimat, directed by Edgar Reitz, examined the 20th-century life of a small fictional village in the Hunsrück.