The fire started on 24 July 2022 in a gorge called Malinový důl, near the village of Hřensko, and within two days it had taken 1,060 hectares. Walkers were pulled out of the ravines. Sixty people were evacuated from the campsite at Dolský mlýn, and the village of Mezná was cleared entirely. Helicopters and crews came in from Poland, Slovakia, Sweden and Germany; the smoke reached Prague in one direction and Dresden in the other. By the time it was finished, roughly ten square kilometres of a national park that covers seventy-nine had burned. Bohemian Switzerland had held national park status for twenty-two years and lost an eighth of itself in a summer. Sandstone, though, does not burn. The forest went; the rock the whole place is named for is exactly where it was.
Protection came early and slowly. The whole of Bohemian Switzerland was placed under a Protected Landscape Area designation in 1972, and when the German side across the border was raised to national park in 1990, the pressure to match it built quickly. A 1991 plan proposed a park covering the full area including the Růžovský vrch, and it ran straight into opposition from owners of hunting land and from the forestry industry. A compromise version fared no better. The argument ran most of a decade before the Czech government decided in 1999 to go ahead with the original extent, and the park came into being on 1 January 2000 - the forest and rock landscape, the Kamenice Gorge and the ground around the Růžovský vrch. The headquarters sit at Krásná Lípa, with information offices at Hřensko and Jetřichovice. A further fire in April 2026 burned around 100 hectares, a reminder that the exposure did not end in 2022.
The idea of a Bohemian Switzerland is younger than the rocks by a good margin, and it was imported. In the eighteenth century the Swiss artists Adrian Zingg and Anton Graff, working out of Dresden, found the sandstone country of northern Bohemia reminiscent of home and the name spread outward from the German side of the border. Romantic-era artists then did what Romantic artists did with wild scenery: they came, they painted, and they sold the results to people who wanted to see it for themselves. Ludwig Richter worked here. Carl Maria von Weber set Der Freischütz in the vicinity of Rathen, just over the border, which put the whole sandstone region into the German operatic imagination. Tourists began arriving in real numbers in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the villages have been in the business ever since.
Bohemian Switzerland occupies the eastern part of the Czech side of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, northeast of Děčín, on the right bank of the Elbe - which for a short stretch is the international border itself. Eastward the land grades into the Lusatian Mountains, westward toward the Ore Mountains. The high point is the Růžovský vrch at 619 metres, a rounded basalt hill that stands apart from everything around it. The low point is more unusual. Hřensko, where the Kamenice meets the Elbe, sits at 130 metres and is the lowest-lying municipality in the Czech Republic; where the Elbe crosses into Germany just downstream, at 115 metres, is the lowest ground in the country outright. Between those two figures lies everything worth walking to, including Pravčická brána, the largest natural sandstone arch in Europe, which stands above the village.
Trade routes ran through these gorges, and castles went up to guard them - though several ended up doing the opposite, serving as bases for robber barons who preyed on the traffic they were meant to protect. Šaunštejn, near Vysoká Lipa, and Falkenštejn are rock castles: chambers, stairs and cisterns cut directly into sandstone pinnacles rather than masonry built on top of them. Human settlement here was thin for most of antiquity, with only scattered Germanic, Slavic and Celtic presence, until German-speaking colonists arrived in the twelfth century. Their descendants, the German Bohemians later known as Sudeten Germans, farmed and logged this country until 1945, when they were expelled after the war and the region was resettled by Czechs. What they built outlasted them. The villages still show Upper Lusatian houses, in which the log walls of the ground-floor room rest on an arcade of wooden posts.
The concentration of viewpoints above Jetřichovice is the reason most walkers come: Mariina skála, Vilemínina stěna and Rudolfův kámen sit within a few hours of each other, each a sandstone platform with a wooden shelter and a drop. Below them Pavlinino údolí carries the Chřibská Kamenice through a deeply incised valley that stays green and cool through August. Na Tokáni is a historic inn and hostel for anyone wanting to stay inside the park. There is a chapel cut into rock at Všemily and a second, smaller arch called the Malá Pravčická brána for those who want to say they saw both. The Kamenice Gorge near Hřensko is the set-piece, walls closing overhead as the water runs between them. Keep walking north and you cross into Saxon Switzerland, where nothing changes but the language on the trail markers.
Bohemian Switzerland centres on 50.83 N, 14.25 E, in the northwestern Czech Republic on the right bank of the Elbe, immediately south of the German border. Best viewed between 2,000 and 4,000 feet AGL following the Elbe upstream from Saxon Switzerland. The river gorge is the primary reference: it enters Czech territory at Hřensko, where the Kamenice joins from the east, and continues southwest toward Děčín. The Růžovský vrch, at 619 metres, is a distinct isolated rounded summit standing above surrounding forest and is the best single navigation mark in the park. The 2022 burn scar northeast of Hřensko remains visible from the air as a lighter, thinner canopy against the surrounding dark forest. Terrain is dissected rather than high - deep narrow ravines cut into a sandstone plateau, with the Elbe at its lowest Czech point of 115 metres at the border. Ústí nad Labem (LKUL) lies about 12 nm southwest, Dresden (EDDC) roughly 25 nm northwest, and Prague (LKPR) around 44 nm south. Valley fog fills the gorges on calm mornings; summer haze from the Ústí industrial basin can reduce slant visibility from the southwest.