Curonian Spit (Russia)

Kurshskaya Kosa National Park was created in 1987 in Kaliningrad oblast, on the southern half of the Curonian Spit; the northern half belongs to Lithuania, where Kuršių Nerija National Park was established in 1991. The spit is a narrow sandy peninsula 98 kilometres long and between 400 and 3,800 metres wide that separates the Curonian Lagoon from the Baltic Sea, and constitutes the largest depositional landform in the Baltic.

It is a landscape formed by the interaction of sea, wind and human activity, and that combination is precisely what makes it distinctive. The spit displays a complete sequence of dune formations: the great ridge with ancient parabolic dunes, the grey or dead dunes of the Nagliai sector, the mobile dunes of Parnidis, the layers of ancient soils buried by sand, the plains of blown sand and the coastal dune ridge. The felling of the forests between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries set off a massive advance of the sand that buried whole villages; the reforestation undertaken from the nineteenth century onwards fixed much of the ridge and saved the spit from disappearing.

In 2000 UNESCO inscribed the spit as a whole, shared between Russia and Lithuania. The decision matters for this catalogue: although its inclusion as a natural or mixed property was at one point recommended, it was finally inscribed as a CULTURAL property, in the cultural landscape category and under criterion (v), as a traditional human settlement representative of the interaction between people and a fragile environment. The spit is also a migratory corridor of the first order for Baltic birds, and at Rybachy one of the oldest bird-ringing stations in the world has operated since 1901.