Kampinoski

Kampinos National Park was created in 1959 in east-central Poland, in the Masovian voivodeship, just north-west of Warsaw. It is Poland's second largest national park by area and the only one in its voivodeship. It was declared with 407 km² and today covers 385.44 km², of which some 46 are under strict protection, plus a peripheral zone of a further 37,756 hectares. The idea of protecting it was raised as early as the 1920s, and in the 1930s the first forest reserves of Granica, Sieraków and Zamczysko were created.

It protects the Kampinos Forest, a remnant of the old Masovian woodland, set on the palaeochannel of the Vistula, in the western part of the Warsaw basin. Its most characteristic geomorphological feature is the alternation between two parallel environments: belts of inland continental dunes, formed by wind over the river sands after the last glaciation and now fixed by pinewoods, and the depressions between them, waterlogged and occupied by marshes, alder carr and damp meadows. It is one of the finest examples of this kind of landscape in Europe.

From the seventeenth century land was cleared and villages were built within the forest, and the farmed area grew well into the twentieth century. Since the late 1970s the park has been buying up that land and progressively reforesting it, reducing settlement inside: recovering a pinewood takes some 150 years and rebuilding a mature broadleaved forest between 350 and 400. The fauna includes elk, beaver and lynx, the subject of a reintroduction programme, as well as a notable woodland and wetland birdlife. In January 2000 UNESCO inscribed the Kampinos Forest Biosphere Reserve, whose boundaries coincide with those of the park's peripheral zone. Beside the park, at Żelazowa Wola, stands the birthplace of Frédéric Chopin.