Qualla: Bohemian Switzerland

Bohemian Switzerland: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Bohemian Switzerland: A Park Argued Into Existence

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Bohemian Switzerland: A Name Borrowed Across a Border

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 s...

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Bohemian Switzerland: The Lowest Ground in the Country

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 towar...

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Bohemian Switzerland: Castles in the Rock, and the People Who Left

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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,...

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Bohemian Switzerland: Where to Walk

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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