Aukštaitija
Lithuania's first national park — a hundred-and-some lakes threaded through pine hills, wooden villages, and old beekeeping forest.
Aukštaitija was Lithuania's first national park, established in 1974 in the lake-thickest corner of the country's northeastern uplands. Around 126 lakes lie inside its bounds, linked by streams and portage-short necks of land into routes a canoe can follow for days — among them Tauragnas, Lithuania's deepest at over sixty metres, and island-set Baluošas. The hill called Ladakalnis serves the classic proof: from one grassy summit you look down on six lakes at once.
Between the waters, the park keeps old Aukštaitija alive in miniature: ethnographic villages of grey timber farmsteads with carved gable-ends, the wooden church and bell tower at Palūšė (1750s, built without a single iron nail, as the guides like to say), and at Stripeikiai a museum of ancient beekeeping — hollow-log hives and bee-gods — in the forest where the craft was practised.
What's worth knowing before you go
Water is the way to see it. Rental canoes and kayaks at Palūšė open up the linked-lake circuits, from an afternoon on Lūšiai to a several-day loop with lakeside campsites; the walking counterpart is the Ladakalnis–Ginučiai circuit, taking in the viewpoint, the watermill village, and a piece of the old Šiliniškės ridge.
Palūšė is the hub for maps, boats, and beds; Ignalina, the rail stop from Vilnius, sits just outside the boundary. July fills the campsites; June and the first September weeks give the same water with half the paddlers and mushrooms starting in the pines.