Fertő-Hanság

Fertő-Hanság National Park was created in 1991 in north-western Hungary, beside the Austrian border, and protects some 238 km² around the Hungarian shore of Lake Fertő, known in Austria as the Neusiedler See, and the adjoining Hanság marshes.

The Fertő is the largest saline lake in central Europe and one of the westernmost steppe lakes on the continent: barely a metre in average depth, with no natural outflow, ringed by a belt of reedbed thousands of hectares across and subject to extreme fluctuations in level, to the point that it has dried out completely several times through history. Three quarters of its surface lie in Austria, but the region functions as a single natural unit that the political border does not alter.

It is a decisive place for waterbirds and migratory birds, with large concentrations of geese, herons, waders and reedbed species. In 2001 the World Heritage Committee inscribed Lake Fertő/Neusiedlersee together with the settlements around it as a CULTURAL landscape, recognising eight millennia of harmonious human shaping of the territory and the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture of its surroundings, with the Esterházy palaces among the outstanding elements. The lake was also declared a biosphere reserve by UNESCO in 1979.