Saxon Switzerland National Park

Put your hand flat against the rock. It feels like coarse sugar under your palm, slightly warm where the sun has reached it and cool and damp where it has not. Grains come loose and stick to your skin. Above you, pale towers of sandstone rise out of the pine and beech forest, streaked with grey, rust and soft green moss. Somewhere below, the Elbe is moving quietly through its valley. This is Saxon Switzerland, and it is made almost entirely of this one crumbling, patient stone.

The story of these rocks begins underwater. Around a hundred million years ago, in the age of the dinosaurs, a shallow sea covered this part of Europe. Rivers carried sand into it, and layer after layer settled on the seabed. Over long ages, that sand pressed together into stone. Later the sea withdrew, the land lifted, and water began cutting into it. Rain, frost and the Elbe itself carved the plateau into gorges, tables and needles. What you see today is not built up. It is what remains after millions of years of erosion.

That is why the landscape looks so strange. Many of the rock formations have flat tops, as if someone sliced them with a knife. Those tops are the old surface of the plateau. The deep, narrow gaps between them are cracks that water widened over time. Geologists call this kind of terrain a sandstone table mountain landscape. Look closely at the cliffs and you can often see the horizontal lines of the original sea layers, stacked like pages in a closed book.

Now, a surprise. The name has almost nothing to do with Switzerland. In the eighteenth century, two Swiss artists worked at the art academy in Dresden, just down the river. They were the engraver Adrian Zingg and the portrait painter Anton Graff. Walking in these hills, they said the scenery reminded them of home. The comparison stuck. Before that, people here usually spoke of the Meissen Highlands. Today the Czech side of the same rock country carries a matching name: Bohemian Switzerland.

Those Dresden artists started something. Through the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, painters, poets and early tourists came looking for wild, dramatic nature. This was the age of Romanticism, a movement that valued emotion, mystery and the power of landscape. Caspar David Friedrich, the great German Romantic painter, made sketches among these rocks. Today a long-distance hiking trail called the Malerweg, the Painters' Way, follows routes those artists used. It runs for more than a hundred kilometres, so most people walk only short stretches of it.

The town you are standing near, Bad Schandau, became one of the main gateways. It sits right on the Elbe, where the Kirnitzsch stream joins the river. In the nineteenth century, the town grew as a spa, and visitors arrived by paddle steamer from Dresden. Some of those historic steamers still work on the river today. From here, paths lead up into the Schrammsteine, a jagged ridge of rock towers, and along the quiet Kirnitzsch valley into the deeper forest.

The Kirnitzsch valley has its own small marvel. A narrow tram line runs from Bad Schandau up the valley, between the stream and the forest road. It has carried passengers since the late nineteenth century. At its end lies the Lichtenhain waterfall. Here is a detail many visitors enjoy. The waterfall is modest, so for a very long time the water has been held back and then released for visitors, turning a gentle trickle into a short, noisy rush.

The national park itself is much younger than its fame. It was created in 1990, in the last weeks before East and West Germany reunited. Conservationists in East Germany pushed hard to protect several landscapes before the political system disappeared, and Saxon Switzerland was one of them. The park is split into two separate areas, with towns, farmland and the river in between. Across the border, the Czech Republic later created Bohemian Switzerland National Park, so the protected rock country now continues into another country.

If you hear metal chiming high above you, look up. This is one of the oldest rock-climbing regions in the world. Climbers began scaling these towers for sport in the second half of the nineteenth century. Over time, local climbers developed strict rules to protect the soft stone. Metal nuts and cams are not allowed. Climbers use knotted slings instead, pushed into cracks. Chalk for the hands is traditionally forbidden too. Some of these ideas about fair, clean climbing spread far beyond Saxony.

The soft stone needs that care. Sandstone breaks down easily. Feet, hands and even heavy rain wear it away. That is why the park asks visitors to stay on marked paths, and why some climbing areas close at certain times of year. Peregrine falcons disappeared from these cliffs during the twentieth century. They were later brought back, and now they nest here again. During the breeding season, routes near their nests are closed so the birds can raise their young in peace.

The most visited place in the park is the Bastei, high above the Elbe near the spa town of Rathen. A stone bridge there spans a deep gap between rock towers. It replaced an earlier wooden bridge in the nineteenth century, and it is still one of the most photographed views in Germany. If you go, try to arrive early in the morning. On autumn days, mist often fills the Elbe valley, and the rock tops rise above it like islands in a white sea.

But the park is not only about famous viewpoints. Much of its value lies in the quiet parts. In the shaded gorges, the air stays cool even in summer, and ferns and mosses cover the rocks. In some deep, damp ravines, plants grow that you would normally find in mountains much higher than these. Walk slowly. Listen for woodpeckers, for water dripping from overhangs, and for the soft crunch of sand under your boots on the trail.

So take one more moment where you are. Look at the rock nearest to you, at its layers, its holes, its patches of green. Every grain of it once lay on the floor of a sea. Rain will keep washing a little of it away, grain by grain, long after today. As you walk on, notice how the light changes on the stone, from honey to grey and back again. The landscape is still slowly changing, even now, while you stand in it.