Podyjí

Podyjí is sixty-three square kilometres, the smallest of the four Czech national parks and one of the smallest in Europe: essentially one river and the woods on its banks. It was a protected landscape area from 1978 and became a national park by a government regulation issued on 20 March 1991 and in force from 10 May — the same two dates as Šumava, the pair declared by consecutive decrees. Across the water, Austria followed nine years later with Nationalpark Thayatal, so the valley is now run as two parks facing each other, which is also why German-language maps call both sides the Thayatal and the Czech park's own map entry carries that name in German.

The landform is the thing. The Dyje arrives from farmland in the west as an ordinary lowland river, full of loops, and then runs into the granite and gneiss of the Bohemian Massif — and instead of being turned aside it cut down through the rock as the rock rose, keeping its meanders and taking them with it. The result is a set of incised meanders up to two hundred metres deep, hairpinning through crystalline rock at the exact edge where the Bohemian upland meets the Pannonian basin. That edge is what makes the biology extravagant for the size. Warm dry Pannonian species come up the valley from the southeast and cool moist Hercynian ones come down from the northwest, and they meet in a park you can cross in an afternoon: oak and hornbeam sun-woods on the south-facing slopes, ravine forest in the shade, and out on the eastern rim above Havraníky a hundred hectares of open heath, the largest in the country. Well over a thousand vascular plants grow in the park. Exmoor ponies were turned onto the heath in 2018, the first large grazers put to work in a Czech national park, and in 2022 the European souslik came back to ground it had given up on. On one meander spur, on the sunniest slope in the park, is Šobes, a vineyard worked since the Middle Ages and rated among the best sites in Europe.

The rest of the park's condition is a Cold War accident. The Dyje was the frontier, and from 1951 almost the whole valley lay inside the hraniční pásmo, the border zone — wire, plough-strips, watchtowers, patrols, and entry only on a permit that took heavy vetting to get. The mills were blown up and levelled, nothing left of the nine that had given Devět mlýnů its name; the cottages went with them, farming stopped, nobody built anything, and for forty years the valley was left to itself under armed guard while the collectivised fields outside were ploughed, drained and fertilised right up to the fence line. What the border did to the people it did the opposite to the woods, and when the wire came down in 1990 the country had an intact river gorge it had not planned for. At Čížov a stretch of the fortification has been kept standing as a memorial, and the village is now the park's information centre; the footbridge at Hardegg reopened the same year, so walkers cross mid-hike between the two parks.

Black storks nest in the old woods, otters work the river, and the European wildcat has come back to the valley — a camera trap on the Austrian bank produced the first certain evidence in decades in 2007, and both parks now watch for it.

What's worth knowing before you go

Znojmo is the gateway and worth a day on its own: a wine town on a rock above the river, with a Romanesque rotunda whose twelfth-century frescoes show the Přemyslid dynasty, and a long network of medieval cellars under the streets. Trains run there from Brno and Vienna. Čížov is the base inside the park, Vranov nad Dyjí the western end, with its baroque chateau on a crag and the 1930s dam just upstream. The valley is best on foot or by bicycle; the heaths flower in spring, the gorge is green and close in summer, and October turns the oak woods. Šobes sells its own wine at the vineyard in season, which is the reason a lot of people walk out to the spur.

The connoisseur's stop is the Ledové sluje — the "ice caves", which are not caves in the ordinary sense but a field of pseudokarst crevices where a block of hillside has pulled apart. Cold air sinks into the fissures and stays, ice can survive in them into summer, and the vegetation on the surface above is montane, several hundred metres lower than it has any business being.