Thy

Thy National Park was established in 2008 in north-western Jutland, between the North Sea and the Limfjorden, and protects some 244 km² along about fifty-five kilometres of coast. It was the first Danish national park.

It is usually described as the largest area of wild country in Denmark, an intensively farmed nation. Its central feature is the dune heath, a habitat of dunes fixed by heather, bilberry and lichens that here reaches its greatest extent in western Europe. Alongside it there are mobile dunes, interdunal lakes, wetlands and mountain pine plantations made in the nineteenth century to halt the advance of the sand, which had come to bury farms and churches.

That sand drift, caused by the deforestation and overgrazing of earlier centuries, was a historic catastrophe for the region and explains much of the present landscape. Today management works in the opposite direction: plantations are thinned to recover the heath and some dunes are allowed to move again. The park is home to red deer, common crane, which has begun breeding again in Denmark in this area, and a heathland amphibian and insect community of great value.