Babiogórski

Babia Góra National Park was created by decree of the Council of Ministers of 30 October 1954, taking effect on 1 January 1955, initially covering some 1,700 hectares. It lies in southern Poland, in the Lesser Poland voivodeship, right on the Slovak border, where it adjoins the Horná Orava landscape park. It takes in the northern and southern slopes of the Babia Góra massif, including its summit, Diablak, at 1,725 metres, the highest in the Żywiec Beskids, as well as a fragment of the slopes of the Polica range.

Protection of the area predates the park: in 1933 the Polish Academy of Sciences created the Babia Góra Reserve, of some 650 hectares. One of the decisive factors in raising its status to national park was precisely what makes this mountain singular: because of its isolated character and its altitude, it displays a zonation of vegetation belts developed in classic and complete form, from the mixed forest of the lower levels to montane beech forest, spruce forest, dwarf mountain pine scrub and, at the summit, alpine vegetation. That sequence, uncommon outside the Tatras, has made it a benchmark botanical laboratory and earned it the nickname of queen of the Beskids.

Among the protected species are plants such as okrzyn jeleni (Laserpitium archangelica), the park's emblem, and Carpathian forest fauna such as the capercaillie, the Carpathian red deer and the lynx. In 1976 UNESCO brought the area into the world network of biosphere reserves under the MAB programme, with a later extension in 2001 to 11,829 hectares, and it also forms part of the Natura 2000 network. The park receives more than a hundred thousand visitors a year, and its headquarters at Zawoja houses an education centre and a garden of the massif's plants.