Šumava
"In Šumava the silence is so complete it starts to feel like a sound — the particular frequency of a forest that has had decades to grow back into itself."
I drove into Šumava from Český Krumlov on a September morning when the mist was still sitting on the valleys, and for the first twenty minutes of the forest I didn’t stop the car because stopping the car didn’t seem like the right response. The road ran through spruce forest so dense and uninterrupted that the light became green and filtered and the temperature dropped three degrees from the fields outside. I eventually pulled off at a gravel lay-by near Borová Lada and sat with the window open, listening. Wind in the upper branches. A crow calling twice and then not again. The steady drip of dew from a bough above the car. That was it.
Šumava — the Bohemian Forest — covers about 125,000 hectares along the border with Bavaria and Austria, and the National Park portion of it is one of the largest temperate forest wilderness areas in Central Europe. The forest is a mix of spruce, beech, and fir, with the spruce heavily dominant in the upper elevations; the bark beetle outbreak of the past twenty years has killed large swathes of it and left standing dead forest that is simultaneously devastating to see and, ecologically, exactly what a rewilding forest looks like when it’s working. The standing dead wood creates habitat. The light comes through differently in those sections — more open, more silver — and the wildflowers in the understorey are doing things that don’t happen in closed canopy.
The peat bogs are the landscape that stays with me most. The Chalupská slať near Borová Lada is accessible by boardwalk — a raised timber path through a landscape of saturated sphagnum moss, stunted pines, and cloudberry that looks nothing like the forest that surrounds it. The bogs have formed over thousands of years of accumulated organic matter and they hold water long after any rain has passed through the rest of the landscape. Walking the boardwalk in early morning, when the mist is still on the bog surface and the pine silhouettes are barely visible, is one of the stranger and more beautiful experiences I’ve had in Central Europe. The bog surface is completely still in a way that moving water never is, and the smell is of cold mineral earth and something old and faintly sweet.
The Iron Curtain ran through Šumava — the border with Bavaria was one of the most heavily militarised sections of the Cold War inner German border, complete with watchtowers, minefields, and cleared kill zones. Most of it was dismantled in 1989, but the traces remain if you know where to look: concrete posts, sections of cleared land now reclaimed by birch and willow, the foundations of watchtowers, memorials to people shot trying to cross. The Iron Curtain Trail follows the old border line and is now a hiking and cycling route through what has become one of the wildest sections of European forest precisely because it was off-limits for forty years.
The human settlements in Šumava are small, scattered, and have the particular quality of places that were once more populated. The Sudeten Germans who had lived here for centuries were expelled in 1945-46, and many of their villages were demolished or simply absorbed by the forest. You walk into what seems like wilderness and find a concrete step that leads to nothing, a fruit tree growing where a garden was, a well with no farmhouse attached. The forest holds these ghosts quietly, without emphasis, and they give the landscape a depth it wouldn’t otherwise have.
When to go: May through June for the wildflowers and the waterfalls fed by snowmelt; September and October for the autumn colours, which in the beeches are extraordinary — deep orange and copper against the dark spruce. Winter is cross-country skiing country, particularly around Kvilda and Borová Lada. The main hiking trails stay accessible year-round but some bog boardwalks close in winter.