Karkonoski

Karkonosze National Park was created in 1959 in south-western Poland, on the border with the Czech Republic, and protects the Polish side of the Giant Mountains, the highest range in the Sudetes. Its summit, Śnieżka, touches 1,603 metres and is one of the most visited points in the country.

Despite its modest altitude, the massif has an almost alpine character because of its position and its climate: the winds and temperatures of the summits have produced above the treeline a belt of subalpine tundra with plant communities that in the rest of central Europe occur only much further north or much higher up, including glacial relicts and some endemics. The slopes also preserve glacial cirques carved in the last glaciation, with vertical walls and small mountain lakes, and high-altitude mires on the summit plateaux.

The massif's spruce forests suffered one of the greatest forest disasters in Europe: sulphur dioxide pollution from the coal-fired power stations of the so-called Black Triangle, on the border between Poland, Czechia and the former GDR, killed the stands on a massive scale between the 1970s and the 1990s. Reduced emissions and restoration work have allowed a progressive recovery, and the process has become a case study in acid rain and forest regeneration. In 1992 UNESCO designated the Krkonoše/Karkonosze Transboundary Biosphere Reserve, of 60,362 hectares, managed jointly by the Polish and Czech national parks, with headquarters at Jelenia Góra and Vrchlabí.