Rhaunen

Rhaunen
Coat of arms
Rhaunen
Location of Rhaunen within Birkenfeld district
Coordinates: 49°51′53″N 7°20′35″E / 49.86472°N 7.34306°E / 49.86472; 7.34306Coordinates: 49°51′53″N 7°20′35″E / 49.86472°N 7.34306°E / 49.86472; 7.34306
Country	Germany
State	Rhineland-Palatinate
District	Birkenfeld
Municipal assoc.	Rhaunen
Government
• Mayor	Manfred Klingel (SPD)
Area
• Total	10.75 km2 (4.15 sq mi)
Population (2015-12-31)
• Total	2,131
• Density	200/km2 (510/sq mi)
Time zone	CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2)
Postal codes	55624
Dialling codes	06544
Vehicle registration	BIR
Website	www.rhaunen.de

Rhaunen is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Birkenfeld district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is the seat of the like-named Verbandsgemeinde.

The municipality lies at the Idar Forest in the Hunsrück in a sprawling, well watered hollow. The hollow separates the Idar Forest massif from the Soonwald massif. Within the village itself, the Lingenbach empties into the Rhaunelbach, which itself, along with the Näßbach, the Macherbach and the Büdenbach, empties into the Idarbach.

The nearest major centres are Idar-Oberstein, Simmern, Morbach and Kirn.

Also belonging to Rhaunen are the outlying centre of Neuzenbrunnen and the homesteads of Hochwälderhof and Königstein.

The solid rock in Rhaunen, Hunsrück slate, comes down from the Devonian. The hollow in which Rhaunen lies was formed by the many brooks that flow together here and that shaped various alluvial fans, which have very loamy subsoil. The Hunsrück slate can be found on the slopes overlooking the hollow, whereas the floodplains down in the dale are characterized by loaminess. While the slopes are mostly covered with mixed forests, meadowland is to be found in the dales, and on the higher-lying terraces and hills, cropraising. The slate was once intensively used as a building material, both for roofing and building walls. Even the many public buildings built in Rhaunen about the turn of the 20th century have unplastered walls made of slate quarrystone. Of the many slate quarries that were once to be found in the dales around Rhaunen, none is still in business. Here and there, though, tailing heaps can still be seen. The biggest operation in the slatemining business was the “Abenstern” quarry on the Wartenberg, going towards Hausen. It was quarrying slate until the late 1950s. The high ridges, of the Idar Forest massif for example, are formed of the most extremely weathering-resistant Taunus quartzite, whose effect on the land is to leave it rather useless for agriculture, although not altogether unusable in forestry. This Taunus quartzite harbours bog iron deposits, which until about the middle of the 19th century were mined and smelted. This was done at the Weitersbacher Hütte (ironworks) near Rhaunen.