Wielkopolski

Greater Poland National Park was created in 1957 a few kilometres south of Poznań, in the west of the country. Its value is fundamentally geomorphological: it protects an exceptionally complete set of landforms left by the last ice sheet on the Polish plain.

Within a small area there is a succession of belts of terminal moraines, sandur plains, meltwater valleys, eskers and kames, and a series of long lakes set in glacial hollows, among them the Góreckie, the best known, with its island and the ruins of a Romantic castle. Scattered across the landscape appear numerous erratic boulders, large rocks of Scandinavian origin carried by the ice and left behind as it melted, several of them protected as natural monuments.

The plant cover is mixed pine and oak woodland on sandy soils, with alder carr in the damp hollows and meadows along the lake edges. The lakes and wetlands support a waterbird and amphibian community notable for an area of this size. Its great added value and its main problem are the same: the proximity of the Poznań conurbation makes the park the lung and the recreation ground of a large city, with very high visitor pressure on a small territory.