High Fens-Eifel

The High Fens-Eifel Nature Park was created in 1971 in eastern Belgium, in the province of Liège and in the German-speaking Community, and protects some 720 km². Together with the Nordeifel Nature Park, created in Germany in 1960, it forms the German-Belgian Nature Park, regarded as the first cross-border nature park in Europe.

Its core is the High Fens, the largest expanse of raised bog in western Europe outside Scandinavia and Ireland. It is a plateau lying between 600 and 694 metres — the Signal de Botrange, the highest point in Belgium — with a climate exceptionally cold and wet for the latitude, with more than 1,400 millimetres of precipitation and persistent fogs.

Those conditions have allowed the survival of plant communities relict from the last glaciation, with sphagnum mosses, bog heather, cottongrass and bilberry, as well as subarctic species that in Belgium exist only here. The bog was severely degraded by peat extraction, drainage and planting with spruce, and since the 1980s restoration programmes that block ditches and remove plantations have been running. Access to the most fragile areas is restricted and is by wooden boardwalk.