České Švýcarsko

České Švýcarsko is the youngest of the Czech national parks and the only one created by an act of parliament rather than a government decree: act 161/1999, in force from 1 January 2000, cutting seventy-nine square kilometres out of the protected landscape area of the Labské pískovce. It is also the lowest — Hřensko, where the Elbe leaves the country, sits at about 115 metres and is the lowest ground in Czechia. Across the border the Germans got there a decade earlier, in the last weeks of the GDR: Nationalpark Sächsische Schweiz was founded on 1 October 1990. The two parks are halves of one rock country, the Elbe Sandstone Highlands, which the river has sawn through in the middle.

The rock is Cretaceous quader sandstone, laid down flat in a shallow sea and lifted without being folded, so it has kept its horizontal bedding and its vertical joints. Water and frost have spent the time since exploiting both, and what is left of the plateau is a labyrinth: free-standing towers, mesas, walled ravines, and gorges narrow enough that the sun reaches the floor for an hour a day. Later volcanism pushed basalt up through it in a scatter of dark cones, Růžovský vrch the most conspicuous. The park's centrepiece is the Pravčická brána, a sandstone arch with a span of about 26.5 metres and an opening some 16 metres high — the largest natural rock arch in Europe — with the Sokolí hnízdo, a small chateau-restaurant built beneath it in 1881 for Prince Edmund Clary-Aldringen, whose family also cut the walkways through the Kamenice gorges in the 1890s and put the flat-bottomed punts on the river that still work the Edmundova and Divoká soutěska today. The gorges run their own climate: cold air pools on the floor and holds, so spruce and montane plants grow at two hundred metres while thermophilous species bake on the mesa tops above them — the vegetation zones stacked upside down.

The name is a borrowing. In the second half of the eighteenth century the sandstone country was taken up by artists working out of the Dresden academy, and the label Saxon Switzerland is traditionally credited to two Swiss among them, Adrian Zingg and Anton Graff, who are said to have found it like home — though every German source hedges the attribution, and the region had older names, the Meissen uplands among them. Whoever coined it, it stuck and it crossed the river: the Bohemian side has been České Švýcarsko ever since. Caspar David Friedrich walked and drew here, and the rocks in his paintings are these rocks.

Then in July 2022 the park burned. The fire started near Hřensko on 24 July, ran through terrain no vehicle could enter, and became the largest wildfire in modern Czech history — something over a thousand hectares, with firefighting aircraft sent in from several other countries, and no formal end to the emergency until September. Its cause was never conclusively established. Its fuel was not in doubt: bark beetle had killed great stands of spruce — themselves planted where the natural mixed forest had been logged out — and the standing deadwood carried the flames through the canyons. The argument that followed, over whether non-intervention management had left the park to burn, was as fierce as Šumava's. On the ground the sandstone came through fine, being rock, and the burn is filling with birch, aspen, rowan and pine, the pioneer species a disturbed sandstone landscape produces on its own. Peregrines are back on the walls, black storks nest in the quieter woods, and Atlantic salmon have been returned to the Kamenice. Recovery is not the whole story, though: fire came back to a different part of the park in May 2026, and the sandstone country is not simply healing from one bad summer.

What's worth knowing before you go

Hřensko is the classic entrance and the busiest — the Pravčická brána is ticketed, and in high summer the walk up from the road is a queue. Mezní Louka, Jetřichovice and Vysoká Lípa are quieter bases with better walking straight from the door. Děčín is the rail gateway on the Czech side; from Dresden the S-Bahn runs down the Elbe to Bad Schandau and buses and the river ferry take it from there, which makes this one of the few national parks in Europe you can reach comfortably by public transport from a major city. The Gabrielina stezka is the historic promenade to the arch. Boats run the Kamenice gorges in the warm half of the year only, and check which of the burned sectors are open before you plan a route through them — restrictions have been lifted in stages rather than all at once.

The connoisseur's detail is in the water. Salmon spawned in the Kamenice, went down the Elbe to the North Sea and came back to breed until industry and weirs finished them off in the last century; the reintroduction has had them returning to this tributary again, several hundred kilometres inland, past Hamburg and Dresden, to a stream you can step across in places.