Šumava

Šumava is the biggest of the Czech national parks — 685 square kilometres along the Bavarian and Austrian border — and the least mountainous-looking. The Bohemian Forest is old, worn ground: rounded granite and gneiss summits rising only a little above broad, waterlogged plateaus, the pláně, at a thousand metres and more. Plechý, at 1,378 metres, is the high point on the Czech side. It was a protected landscape area from 1963 and the national park was carved out of it in 1991, by a government regulation issued on 20 March, the same day as Podyjí's, both in force from 10 May. Directly across the frontier is Nationalpark Bayerischer Wald, Germany's first, and the two together make one of the largest continuous protected forests in Central Europe — the Green Roof of Europe, as the tourist boards have it.

The plateau holds water rather than shedding it, and the peat bogs are the park's real signature: Chalupská slať, Jezerní slať, the great complex of the Modravské slatě, dwarf pine and cotton grass and sphagnum on ground that has been accumulating since the ice left. The Vltava rises on one of them, on the flank of Černá hora near Kvilda, and leaves as a brown peat stream. Under the steeper northern faces sit eight glacial tarns, five of them Czech — Černé and Čertovo below the Jezerní stěna, Plešné under Plechý, Prášilské, and Laka — cirque lakes gouged out when small glaciers hung on these slopes. The forest around them is spruce, and higher up it is the natural spruce of a cold, wet plateau rather than a plantation. Lower down it is a plantation, and a dated one: a storm on 26 October 1870 threw one to two million trees here in a few hours, the beetle outbreak that followed ran seven years, and the replanting afterwards put in the even-aged spruce whose descendants are dying now.

Use is still legible under the trees. For centuries the Zlatá stezka, the Golden Trail, brought salt north from Passau over these passes and sent grain, hops and beer back south — as many as twelve hundred pack-horses a week through Prachatice at the sixteenth-century peak — until an imperial monopoly on Austrian salt killed the traffic in 1706, leaving hollow ways still cut deep into the hillsides above the Blanice. The Schwarzenbergs then moved timber on water: the Vchynicko-Tetovský canal, begun in 1799, fed the Vydra, and the Schwarzenberg canal, started ten years before it, ran logs south to the Danube and on to Vienna. Then the border closed. From 1951 the range went inside the wire — zakázané pásmo, forbidden ground, along the line itself, permit-only border zone behind it — and the villages caught there, Bučina, Knížecí Pláně, Zhůří and others, were emptied and demolished, leaving orchards, field walls and church foundations in the grass. Forty years of that is why there is a park here at all.

Since 1991 the argument has been about dead trees. The park's strict zone was halved in 1995 and broken into 135 islands so the beetle could be fought in the gaps, and it then sat unchanged for twenty years. The Kyrill windstorm of January 2007 flattened great blocks of spruce, bark beetle followed into the windthrow, and the park split — and the country with it — over whether to log the outbreak or let it run in the core zones. Loggers, foresters, mayors, ecologists and courts all had a turn; activists chained themselves to trees at Ptačí potok in 2011, and the courts afterwards found the logging had gone ahead without the consents it required. A 2017 amendment to the nature protection act rebuilt the zoning system, and Šumava's four zones were gazetted in 2020 — the first enlargement of the strict zone since the park was founded, and barely past where it began: a bit over a quarter of the park left to natural processes outright, nearly as much again to be steered toward them and then released, and nothing able to change again before 2035.

The ground has since made the more persuasive argument. Counts under the grey standing skeletons found some 6,200 seedlings to the hectare against about 3,300 on the salvaged clear-cuts — nearly twice as many, and comfortably past the three thousand the forestry rules ask for — with almost all of it self-sown rather than planted. High up it returns as spruce and little else; the rowan and beech that will make it a mixed forest come in lower down. Šumava holds the country's only viable capercaillie population and the joint count with the Bavarian park has been climbing, three-toed woodpeckers work the standing dead spruce for the grubs in it, and wolves have returned — one born here was found dead on a road outside Hamburg, some eight hundred kilometres north. The lynx, brought back from the Carpathians in the 1980s, tell the sharper story. Inside the two parks they survive well enough that the population creeps upward, and the parks seed the country around them; beyond the boundary the animals go missing year after year, and almost nobody is ever convicted for it.

What's worth knowing before you go

Modrava, Kvilda, Srní and Prášily are the walking bases on the plateau; Železná Ruda in the northwest and Horní Planá on Lipno at the southeastern end are the towns. Rail is unusually good for a place this empty — the Plzeň line runs to Železná Ruda and over the border to Bayerisch Eisenstein, and the southern branches thread to Volary, Černý Kříž and Nové Údolí, where you can walk into Germany. Buses serve the plateau villages in season and the park runs green-transport links. In the quiet zones you must keep to the marked routes, some of which close seasonally for capercaillie; the bogs are boardwalked because they are fragile and because they are deeper than they look. Late spring for the bog flora, autumn for the light, winter for cross-country skiing on the pláně, which is the way most Czechs know the place.

The connoisseur's walk is the Schwarzenberg canal in its southern section. It is a shallow stone-lined channel running dead level along a contour through the woods, and when you follow it far enough you realise you have crossed the divide between the North Sea and the Black Sea without climbing anything — which was exactly the point.