Åsnen

Åsnen became Sweden's 30th national park in 2018, and it protects a kind of landscape no earlier park had: the shallow, island-strewn forest lakes of the southern Swedish interior. Three quarters of the park is water — a corner of lake Åsnen south of Växjö, scattered with wooded islands and skerries, fringed by reed bays and drowned-looking shore forest. It reads less like a lake with islands than like a forest the water got into.

The biological centre of gravity is Bjurkärr, an old beech forest on a peninsula jutting into the lake — one of southern Sweden's finest stands, full of fallen trunks and standing dead wood, and famous among entomologists for the beetles that need exactly that. Around it the park mixes beech and oak with pine on the thinner soils, a reminder that this is the old border country between the southern broadleaf belt and the conifer north.

The birds are the other reason the park exists. Åsnen holds one of the densest osprey populations in the country, white-tailed eagles patrol the open water, and the shallow bays fill with waterfowl on migration. Much of the island world is bird sanctuary, closed in the breeding season, which is also why the park can afford to be as visited as it is: the busy parts and the protected parts are different places.

What's worth knowing before you go

The main entrance is at Sunnabron on the western shore, with a second at Trollberget; both have short trails and boardwalks, and Växjö is about forty minutes away. This is flat, gentle country best experienced at water level — canoe rental is easy to find around the lake, and paddling between the islands is the park at its best, with the sanctuary closures marked on the park map. Spring and early autumn are the seasons for birds; May is the season for Bjurkärr, when the beeches leaf out in that first improbable green.

One local detail: the Urshult shore just south of the park is Sweden's old fruit-growing district, and a visit in apple-blossom time pairs the two landscapes nicely.