Söderåsen

Söderåsen National Park was established in 2001 in Scania, some thirty kilometres east of Helsingborg, between the municipalities of Klippan and Svalöv, and protects some 16 km². It forms part of the horst landscape of southern Sweden, a system of blocks raised by faults whose basic arrangement is about 150 million years old.

Its value lies in its forest: it holds one of the largest continuous protected expanses of deciduous woodland in northern Europe, dominated by beech and accompanied by oak, alder, hornbeam and birch. Some beeches and oaks exceed forty metres in height and are among the tallest broadleaved trees in Sweden. Deadwood is left to rot in place except where it poses an immediate danger, and that accumulation supports an exceptional community of fungi, insects and mosses: Söderåsen has a very high bryophyte diversity, with species that in Sweden are found only here or in very few nearby places. In Sweden only 5% of the remaining deciduous woodland is adequately protected.

The relief is steep for the south of the country: deep fault valleys, landslip slopes with cliffs and fast streams. The most visited is Skäralid, a cleft of remarkable proportions with vertical walls along whose floor runs the Skärån brook; nearby are the small circular lake of Odensjön and the viewpoints of Kopparhatten, Hjortsprånget and Lierna. Much of the park had been planted with spruce, a non-native and more profitable species, and since its declaration a restoration programme has been developed, funded in part by the European Union LIFE programme, which has replanted more than half a million trees of local provenance.