Góry Stołowe

The Stołowe Mountains are Poland's only table mountains, and the national park declared over them in 1993 protects a geological one-off: Upper Cretaceous quartz sandstones laid flat in a shallow sea, lifted without folding, and then taken apart layer by layer. The result is a staircase of mesas rising to Szczeliniec Wielki (919 m), their capstones split by deep crevices — the szczeliny that name the summit — and weathered into free-standing pillars, tottering mushrooms and blocky animals. The Skalne Grzyby belt strings the best of the mushroom rocks along a wooded shelf, and behind the scarps the plateau carries the Wielkie Torfowisko Batorowskie, a raised bog of Sudeten pine hidden in the spruce.

Szczeliniec has been in the tourism business longer than almost any summit in Europe. Franz Pabel, the village elder of Karłów below, cut a stone stair to the top in 1790 — 682 steps, still the way up — and was later formally licensed as a mountain guide, arguably Europe's first. Goethe climbed here in 1790; John Quincy Adams, future American president, followed in 1800 and wrote the place up in his Silesian letters. The summit is a labyrinth of named chambers and chasms, with ladders and squeezes between rock walls and sudden window-views across to the Broumov cliffs in Bohemia — the same sandstone country continuing over an invisible border.

The park's second maze, Błędne Skały on the Skalniak plateau, is a one-way circuit through corridors that narrow to shoulder width beneath a ceiling of perched blocks — film scouts for the Narnia series thought it otherworldly enough for Prince Caspian, and they were right. Between the two, the Szosa Stu Zakrętów — the Road of a Hundred Bends — corkscrews through the park's forest from Radków to Kudowa-Zdrój, a spa-town hinterland that gives the whole range a genteel, Kurort air at odds with the wild geology above.

What's worth knowing before you go

Kudowa-Zdrój is the natural base, with buses from Kłodzko and Wrocław; Karłów hamlet sits directly under Szczeliniec's stair, and Radków serves the quieter northern scarps. Both honeypots charge entry, run one-way circuits, and queue by mid-morning in July and August — be at the gates at opening or come after four. The stone steps glaze dangerously with ice from November into March, when parts of the circuits close.

Cross-border walking into the Czech Broumovské stěny is straightforward and recommended. The connoisseur's day skips the queues entirely: traverse the Skalne Grzyby shelf on a weekday, when the mushroom rocks and the bog boardwalk are empty — and in an autumn inversion, when cloud fills the Broumov basin, the mesas ride above it like a fleet at anchor.