Tatras (Slovakia)

Tatra National Park, TANAP, was established in 1949 in northern Slovakia, beside the Polish border, and was the country's first national park. It protects some 738 km² of the Tatra massif, the highest range in the Carpathians, which culminates in Gerlachovský štít, above 2,650 metres.

It is the northernmost alpine-type range in Europe, and that northerly character is what makes it distinctive: the vegetation belts appear at far lower altitudes than in the Alps, and alpine and arctic species live together within a very compressed space. The relief is fully glacial, with cirques, U-shaped valleys, moraines and more than a hundred high lakes, the plesá, among them Štrbské pleso and Veľké Hincovo pleso.

The fauna includes the Tatra chamois, a subspecies endemic to the massif that came to the brink of extinction, the alpine marmot, the brown bear and the lynx. Together with the Polish Tatra National Park, which it borders, it forms the Tatra Biosphere Reserve, recognised by UNESCO in 1992. The park faces the pressure of very high visitor numbers and has suffered severe episodes of forest damage, such as the windstorm of November 2004, which brought down millions of cubic metres of timber in a few hours.