Bohemian Switzerland

Where it sits. Bohemian Switzerland — České Švýcarsko in Czech, Böhmische Schweiz in German — is the Czech share of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, in the far northwest of the country northeast of Děčín, where the Elbe cuts a gorge through a sandstone plateau and crosses into Germany. The national park covers the right bank of the river and adjoins Saxon Switzerland National Park on the German side; together the two are known as Saxon-Bohemian Switzerland. The highest point is not sandstone at all but Růžovský vrch, a basalt cone rising to 619 metres above the surrounding tablelands, and the park extends east towards the Lusatian Mountains.

Why it has a Swiss name. The label was invented in the eighteenth century by two Swiss artists, Adrian Zingg and Anton Graff, who worked in Dresden and thought the rock country reminded them of home. The name stuck to the Saxon side first and was later extended across the border. What the sandstone actually resembles is nothing in Switzerland: Cretaceous sea-floor deposits, lifted and then dissected by water and frost into free-standing towers, mesas, ravines and natural arches, with beech and spruce forest filling the gaps between them.

The story behind it. Castles were built through these rocks in the Middle Ages to watch the trade routes, and several of them — Šaunštejn and Falkenštejn among them — were later used as robber-baron hideouts; they survive as stairways, cisterns and beam sockets cut into the pinnacles rather than as buildings. The region was thinly populated until German-speaking settlers colonised it in the twelfth century, and it remained German-speaking, as part of the Sudetenland, until the expulsions after 1945; the Upper Lusatian timber-framed houses in villages such as Vysoká Lípa and Jetřichovice are the visible legacy of that history. Romantic-era tourism arrived in the second half of the nineteenth century, drawn by the same wild scenery that had already reached painting and opera. Protection came in 1972 as a landscape area, and the Czech government created the national park proper on 1 January 2000 after a decade of argument with hunting and forestry interests. The park authority is based in Krásná Lípa, with information offices at Hřensko and Jetřichovice.

On screen. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) filmed its Czech landscape material in this park, working here and in Prague after the 2004 Christmas break and wrapping in February 2005. The centrepiece location is Pravčická brána, the largest natural sandstone arch in Europe, whose surroundings supplied the wooded, snow-fringed country the children cross. Because climbing on the arch has been banned since 1982, the shots in which figures appear to run along the top of the span were made on a studio set and composited into the real landscape — a useful thing to know before comparing the film frame with the view from the terrace.

What you actually see today. The signature outing is the Kamenice gorge near Hřensko, where flat-bottomed boats are poled through a ravine with walls rising vertically from the water and the boatman's commentary bouncing off the rock. Above it, the plateau carries a dense network of marked trails: the arch itself, the viewpoints of Mariina skála, Vilemínina stěna and Rudolfův kámen above Jetřichovice, the deeply incised Pavlinino údolí, the small rock chapel at Všemily, and Malá Pravčická brána, the arch's little sibling. Wildlife includes returning peregrines, black storks and the occasional lynx. The historic inn at Na Tokáni still functions as a hostel in the middle of the forest, and the region was named a European Destination of Excellence in 2009 for its low-key approach to visitor management.

Getting there and timing. Děčín, on the main Prague–Dresden railway, is the gateway; from there local buses run down the Elbe to Hřensko and up the Kamenice valley, and the drive from Prague takes about two hours. Cross-border trains and the ferry over the Elbe make it straightforward to combine the Czech and Saxon sides in one trip. May and June are ideal — the gorge boats are running, the forest is fresh and the crowds have not yet peaked — while September and October bring colour and morning inversions that fill the valleys with mist. Two large wildfires have marked the park in recent years, one of around 1,000 hectares in July 2022 and another of about 100 hectares in April 2026, and trails through burned sections close periodically for safety and regeneration, so current closures are worth checking. Sandstone steps and ladders are slick in the wet, and the plateau is colder and windier than the river valley below.