Söderåsen

Söderåsen is a horst — a block of ancient bedrock heaved up along fault lines when the continent flexed — standing two hundred metres over the Skåne plain, and the national park (2001) protects its most dramatic flank: a landscape of deep ravines cut into the ridge, walled with scree and roofed almost completely with beech. This is one of the largest tracts of protected broadleaf forest in northern Europe, and in a country of spruce and pine it feels imported — a piece of the continent's great beech belt marooned at its northern edge.

The set piece is Skäralid, a gorge driving a kilometre and a half into the ridge between ninety-metre walls, with a stream and a black little lake on its floor and the viewpoint of Kopparhatten hanging over it from the rim — the most visited outlook in Skåne, for honest reasons, above all in the last week of October when the beech canopy below turns to copper in one coordinated event. Nearby, the perfectly circular tarn of Odensjön sits sunk in its own rock amphitheatre above Röstånga like a green eye.

The forest rewards the slower registers too: the ravine floors are damp, mossy and full of dead beech, which makes the park a stronghold for fungi, beetles and hole-nesting birds, while red kites — Skåne's great raptor comeback — tilt over the ridge on most days.

What's worth knowing before you go

The main entrance at Skäralid, with the park's naturum, lies on road 13 between Klippan and Röstånga, with buses from both; Kopparhatten also has road access from above, which is why it is crowded and the ravine paths below it are not. The Skåneleden long-distance trail crosses the park, and the ravine circuits are proper walking — steep, rooty and slippery when wet, unusual for Skåne. Late April–May (leaf-burst and floor flora) and late October (the copper week) are the two seasons that justify planning around.

The connoisseur's inversion: walk Skäralid from the bottom up rather than driving to the rim — the gorge is built to be entered, and the view from the floor is the better one.