Montañas de la Mesa (Stołowe)

Stołowe Mountains National Park was created in 1993 in south-western Poland, in the central Sudetes, next to the Czech border. It protects the only massif of tabular relief in the country: instead of ridges and valleys, the landscape is organised into stepped horizontal plateaux separated by vertical escarpments, like a succession of stacked tables.

The cause is geological. The massif formed on sandstones and marls laid down in a Cretaceous sea, arranged in horizontal layers of unequal hardness; erosion has dismantled the soft ones and left the hard ones standing proud, generating flat platforms topped by cornices. On those platforms, weathering has cut networks of fissures and corridors into the rock that form genuine stone labyrinths, such as the famous Błędne Skały, the Errant Rocks, and has isolated blocks and spires of fanciful shape on the summit of Szczeliniec Wielki, the park's highest point.

The plant cover is made up of spruce woods, largely planted and in the process of being converted into more natural stands of beech and fir, with upland peat bogs on the poorly drained plateaux. Cliff-nesting birds breed on the walls and in the labyrinths and bats shelter there, and the cold, damp microclimate of the fissures holds uncommon communities of mosses and ferns. The spectacular landscape has made the park one of the most visited in Poland, with the resulting pressure on paths cut into very fragile rock.