Gesäuse

Gesäuse National Park was established in 2002 in Styria, in north-central Austria, and protects some 110 km² in the Northern Limestone Alps. It is the youngest of the Austrian national parks.

Its name comes from the noise of the water: the river Enns crosses the massif here in a narrow gorge some sixteen kilometres long, with continuous rapids and limestone walls rising more than a thousand metres above the channel. The contrast between the valley floor, at little more than five hundred metres, and the summits of the Hochtor, which rise above 2,360 metres, produces a complete succession of belts within a very short horizontal distance.

The walls of the Gesäuse are a historic destination for Alpine climbing: some of the classic routes of the Eastern Alps were opened here and much of the technique of limestone climbing was developed here. The park preserves beech and fir woods, alpine meadows and a rock flora rich in Eastern Alpine endemics, and it is home to Alpine ibex, chamois and bearded vulture, the last of these from the Alpine reintroduction programme. Management is explicitly oriented towards the free development of natural processes, avalanches and rockfalls included.