Wolin

Woliński Park Narodowy, declared in 1960, holds the moraine heart of Wolin island, wedged between open Baltic and the Szczecin Lagoon. Its signature is the cliff line east of Międzyzdroje: Gosań at ninety-three metres is the highest point on the Polish coast, Kawcza Góra a nearer sixty-one, and both are active — the sea undercuts the till, winter storms take the toe, and mature beeches ride the collapse down to the shore. The retreat is measured in tens of centimetres a year, which means the park is permanently, honestly unfinished; paths along the lip get re-routed as the edge comes to meet them.

In 1996 the park did something no Polish park had done: it took the sea in, adding a one-nautical-mile belt of Baltic plus the islet maze of the Świna's back-delta — the wsteczna delta, forty-odd low reed islands built where lagoon water pushes backwards through the strait — and more than doubling to some 109 square kilometres, Poland's first marine national park. The lagoon side is the ornithological half: white-tailed eagles, the park's emblem, breed in the old beech and patrol the reeds, and the shallows stage ducks in thousands. Inland, the beech forest over knobbly moraine hides kettle lakes, a small żubrowisko — the show reserve where European bison stand in for the island's vanished big fauna — and the flooded chalk quarry at Wapnica, Jezioro Turkusowe, whose lime-clouded water really is turquoise.

The island's human deep time is disproportionate to its size. At its southern tip, the town of Wolin sits on one of the great early-medieval emporia of the Baltic — a ninth-to-eleventh-century trading town of Slavs and Scandinavians that legend inflated into Jomsborg and sunken Vineta — and re-enacts itself each summer at the Slavs and Vikings festival. Międzyzdroje, the park's gateway, is the opposite era: a nineteenth-century bathing resort with pier, promenade and a walk-of-fame of Polish film stars.

What's worth knowing before you go

Międzyzdroje lies on the Szczecin–Świnoujście rail line, and the cliff paths start at the town's eastern end — Kawcza Góra's 287 steps first, then the forest ridge to Gosań. Treat the cliffs as live geology: keep off the crumbling lip and off the beach directly beneath fresh falls, especially after rain or frost. The bison reserve and Turkusowe at Wapnica make the easy half-day; the delta islets are best from the water or the viewpoints above Lubin.

July and August are resort season with resort crowds; May's raw new beech leaf and September's low light over the lagoon are the months the park looks like itself. The connoisseur's hour is dusk on Zielonka hill above Lubin, when the back-delta resolves into a silver-and-reed mosaic and the day's last eagle crosses to roost — the park's best view faces the lagoon, not the sea.