Šumava National Park

Listen for a moment. The wind moves through the spruce tops high above you, a long soft rush like distant water. Underfoot, the ground gives a little. Needles, moss and dark peat lie in thick layers here. The air smells of resin and damp stone, and on cool mornings mist hangs low between the trunks. This is Šumava, the Bohemian Forest, and you are standing in the largest national park in the Czech Republic.

The park was declared in 1991, soon after the fall of communism. It stretches along the southwestern edge of the country, where Bohemia meets Bavaria and Austria. Much of its northern part lies here, in the Klatovy District. The landscape is not dramatic in the way of sharp alpine peaks. Instead, it rolls. Long, rounded ridges covered in forest roll away in every direction, and broad high plateaus sit between them. Many people find this gentleness deeply calming.

Here is something most visitors do not realise. Across the border, the forest continues without a break into Germany's Bavarian Forest National Park. That park was the first national park in Germany. Together, the two parks form one of the largest connected areas of protected forest in Central Europe. Deer, lynx and birds cross the line freely. For the animals, the border on the map does not exist.

But for people, that border mattered a great deal. During the Cold War, this frontier was part of the Iron Curtain. A wide strip of land along the border was closed to the public. Soldiers patrolled it, and fences ran through the trees. Many villages near the line were emptied, especially after the German-speaking population was expelled at the end of the Second World War. Houses fell down, and fields slowly turned back into meadow and forest.

And this is the second surprise. That long period of isolation helped nature here. For decades, very few people entered the border zone. There was little building, little tourism and little traffic. Wildlife had space and quiet. When the fences came down, scientists and conservationists found a landscape that was wilder than almost anywhere else in this part of Europe. The park grew out of that strange gift from a hard time.

If you walk deeper in, you may come to one of the moors. Locals call them slatě. These are raised peat bogs that formed slowly after the last Ice Age. Wooden boardwalks often lead across them, because the ground is soft and fragile. Look for dwarf pines, cotton grass and small dark pools of water. The colours here are muted — rust, olive, silver grey. On a still day, the silence is almost complete.

Šumava also holds glacial lakes, left behind when ice sheets carved hollows into the mountains. Two of the best known lie in the Klatovy District, near the town of Železná Ruda. Black Lake is the largest natural lake in the Czech Republic. Its neighbour is Devil's Lake. Both sit below steep forested slopes, and the water often looks almost black under the trees.

Devil's Lake has a story. Legend has it that the devil once tried to cause trouble here and was trapped beneath the water with heavy stones. Locals say that is why the slope above the lake is covered in boulders. It is folklore, of course. The real explanation is glaciers and frost. But standing on the shore on a grey afternoon, you can understand why people told the tale.

These hills are also the birthplace of a river every Czech child knows. The Vltava rises in Šumava. It flows north through Bohemia and on through Prague. In the nineteenth century, the composer Bedřich Smetana wrote a famous piece of music that follows the river from its small springs in the forest to the great city. Many Czechs hear that melody in their heads when they think of these hills.

You may notice large areas of grey, standing dead trees, or young spruce growing thickly between fallen trunks. This is part of an ongoing and heated debate. Storms and the bark beetle, a small insect that attacks spruce, have killed large stretches of forest. In some zones, the park leaves nature to recover on its own. Some people see this as wild renewal. Others see damage. Look closely, and you will find the next generation of trees already rising.

People have lived in this forest for a long time, but life here was never easy. Winters are long, snowy and cold. Some of the settlements on the high plateaus are among the coldest inhabited places in the country. In past centuries, people made a living from timber, glass and small farms. Glassworks needed huge amounts of wood for their furnaces, and the forest supplied it. Scattered wooden houses and old chapels still carry traces of that working life.

Today, the park is a place for slow travel. In summer, hikers and cyclists follow marked trails over the ridges and along the rivers. In winter, cross-country skiers glide across the white plateaus. Some core areas are strictly protected, and paths there may be closed or seasonal. That is deliberate. The quiet spaces give rare birds, such as the capercaillie, a large forest grouse, the calm they need to survive.

Wildlife here is shy. You are more likely to see tracks than animals. The lynx, a wild cat with tufted ears, was brought back to this region in the twentieth century after it had disappeared. Very few visitors ever see one. Still, it is good to know that somewhere in the trees around you, a lynx may be resting, watching or hunting.

Before you move on, stand still once more. Notice the light falling through the branches in thin bars. Notice how the sound of the wind changes as you leave the open ground and enter the trees. Every step you take here crosses ground that was once closed, once guarded, and is now open again. Walk gently, and let the forest keep its quiet.