Kuršių nerija

Kuršių nerija is Lithuania's half of the Curonian Spit: a sand ribbon ninety-eight kilometres long and in places only a few hundred metres wide, holding the Curonian Lagoon apart from the open Baltic. The sea built it over about five thousand years; people nearly unbuilt it in two centuries of deforestation, when unloosed dunes buried village after village. The heroic nineteenth-century replanting that pinned the sand down is itself part of why UNESCO listed the whole spit — jointly with the Russian half — as a cultural landscape in 2000. The national park dates from 1991.

The great dunes still move where they are allowed to. From the Parnidis dune above Nida, with its sundial obelisk, the view is pure desert falling into two waters at once; the Grey Dunes to the south are a strict reserve of bare, lichen-crusted sand. Nida itself — brown-timbered, blue-shuttered — was the summer colony of German expressionists, and Thomas Mann's cottage still looks over the lagoon. At Juodkrantė, a hillside of carved devils and witches climbs through the pines, and one of Europe's larger heron-and-cormorant colonies rackets in the trees.

What's worth knowing before you go

There is no bridge: you arrive by ferry from Klaipėda (foot passengers from the Old Town, cars from the southern terminal) and a single road runs the length to Nida. The park levies an entry fee per vehicle; the flat, forested cycle path running the full spit is the better way anyway.

Walk the marked dune paths only — the sand is genuinely fragile, and rangers fine wanderers. July and August are packed; June and September give the same light on emptier sand. The Lithuanian–Russian border cuts the spit just south of Nida: the park, like this map, ends there.