🇨🇿 Czechia · Southern and northern Bohemia
Bohemian Switzerland is one of the most astonishing landscapes in central Europe: a maze of sandstone sculpted by millions of years of erosion, with rock arches, towers, deep canyons and forests climbing the crags. It was born from a Cretaceous sea whose sediments turned to stone and were then carved by water and wind into these impossible shapes. The German Romantic painters — Caspar David Friedrich the most famous — fell in love with these crags and helped make them famous; the name 'Switzerland' was given to them by two Swiss artists in the eighteenth century.
Its jewel is the Pravčická brána, the largest natural sandstone arch in Europe, a work of nature so monumental it looks like a portal to another world (Hollywood used it in 'The Chronicles of Narnia'). Below it, in the gorges of the river Kamenice, boat rides run between rock walls covered in moss, an experience that has existed since 1890. All of this makes up the Bohemian Switzerland National Park, created in the year 2000, the youngest in Czechia.
But this guide arrives at a particular moment, and it says so honestly: in July 2022, the largest forest fire in Czech history burned much of the park. Since then, some trails and services have been recovering little by little. Here we tell you what is really open today — the Pravčická arch, the gorges and their boats, the main walks — and what is worth checking before you go, as well as how to get there from Prague or Dresden, real prices and tips for enjoying this unique landscape without surprises.
Bohemian Switzerland is a sandstone landscape formed from the sediments of a Cretaceous sea, then carved by erosion into arches, canyons and towers. In the eighteenth century, the Swiss painters Adrian Zingg and Anton Graff, based in Dresden, christened the neighbouring region 'Saxon Switzerland' because it reminded them of home, and the name spread to the Bohemian side. Romanticism, with Caspar David Friedrich at its head, turned these crags into an icon. In 1890, Prince Edmund Clary-Aldringen opened the boat rides through the gorges of the river Kamenice to the public. In the year 2000 the Bohemian Switzerland National Park was created, the youngest in the country. In July 2022, the largest forest fire in Czech history burned some 1,000 hectares of the park. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓From the ponds and castles of the Rožmberks in the south — Český Krumlov, České Budějovice, Třeboň — to the textile Sudetenland of Liberec and the sandstone canyons of Bohemian Switzerland in the north: the Bohemia of the great noble houses and of the borderlands.
Read the history of Southern and northern Bohemia →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Bohemian Switzerland you have to go back some ninety million years, to the Cretaceous period, when this whole region was covered by a warm, shallow sea. On its floor, layer upon layer, enormous quantities of sand were deposited, carried by rivers from neighbouring lands. Over millions of years, pressure and minerals cemented that sand into rock: sandstone. When the sea withdrew and the region emerged, a gigantic plateau of sandstone tens of metres thick was left behind.
What came next was the work of water, ice and wind. The rivers — the Elbe (Labe) and its tributaries, such as the Kamenice — cut down into the soft rock, carving deep canyons. The vertical cracks in the sandstone widened with ice and rain, isolating blocks that erosion sculpted into towers, needles, labyrinths and arches. So this unmistakable landscape of crags, gorges and 'rock cities' was born, spreading across both sides of today's Czech-German border and forming what we now call Bohemian Switzerland (on the Czech side) and Saxon Switzerland (on the German side).
The jewel of that erosion is the Pravčická brána, the largest natural sandstone arch in Europe: a rock bridge with a span of some 26 metres that water and time hollowed out underneath, leaving the arch standing. It is a formation as fragile as it is monumental, and that is why walking on it is forbidden: every step would speed up an erosion that will, sooner or later, bring it down, as has already happened with other arches in the region. Sandstone, moreover, makes a poor, acidic soil, which explains the conifer forests and the corners of damp, cool microclimate at the bottom of the gorges, where mosses and ferns grow as if in a world apart.
The name of this region does not come from geography but from art. In the second half of the eighteenth century, two Swiss artists, the engraver Adrian Zingg and the painter Anton Graff, were called to the Art Academy in Dresden, the capital of Saxony. When they came to know the landscape of crags and gorges south-east of the city, they were so impressed that they began to call it 'Saxon Switzerland' (Sächsische Schweiz), because the masses of sandstone and the deep valleys reminded them of their native Jura. The name caught on, and shortly afterwards it spread to the Bohemian side of the border, which came to be called 'Bohemian Switzerland' (České Švýcarsko).
The great impulse came with Romanticism. The painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the supreme figure of German Romantic landscape painting, walked and drew these crags and turned them into a symbol of the sublime: the smallness of the human being before the immensity and mystery of nature. His solitary figures looking out over seas of mist above sandstone cliffs — inspired in large part by this landscape — became universal icons of European art. Friedrich was, in a way, Zingg's pictorial heir, and through his paintings whole generations of travellers learned to look at these rocks with wonder.
So, from the end of the eighteenth century and through the nineteenth, Saxon Switzerland and Bohemian Switzerland became one of the first destinations of Romantic tourism in central Europe: travellers, poets and painters came to walk among the crags, to watch the dawn from the viewpoints and to look for that feeling between the beautiful and the terrible that Romanticism prized so highly. The landscape, which for centuries had been little more than a wild border corner, became famous thanks to the eye of the artists.
As the landscape's fame grew, someone had the idea of making one of its most secret corners accessible: the gorges of the river Kamenice, canyons so narrow and enclosed that until then they were almost impossible to travel through. The driving force was Prince Edmund Clary-Aldringen, owner of much of this land, who at the end of the nineteenth century decided to fit out the passage through the gorges for the emerging tourist trade.
Around 1889-1890, Clary-Aldringen brought in Italian experts and workmen — known locally as 'barbaros' — who, under Italian direction, built walkways, bridges, tunnels and small weirs along the canyon. To cut the tunnels in the rock they used an ingenious technique: they heated the sandstone with fire and cooled it suddenly with water, so that the stone cracked and could be removed more easily. The weirs raised the water level enough for flat boats to sail. The first of these gorges, the Edmund Gorge (Edmundova soutěska, also called the 'quiet gorge'), some 500 metres long, opened to the public on 4 May 1890, followed by a restaurant and, shortly afterwards, by the Wild Gorge (Divoká soutěska).
Since then, the boat ride through the gorges has been the classic experience of Bohemian Switzerland. Boatmen pushing the craft with a pole guide visitors between moss-covered rock walls, while the green water reflects the crags; in the 1920s more than a dozen boats were operating in the Edmund Gorge. It was also at this time, in 1881, that the prince had the Sokolí hnízdo chalet (the 'Falcon's Nest') built beside the Pravčická brána, a Swiss-style pavilion with a restaurant and viewing terraces that is still the place from which the great arch is contemplated. The whole region was already organising itself as a first-rank tourist destination, long before it became a national park.
For much of the twentieth century, the area was partly protected, first as part of reserves and then, after the Second World War and under the communist regime, within landscape protection designations. The border with Germany — and, during the Cold War, with the German Democratic Republic — ran across the massif, which in some stretches limited access and, paradoxically, helped conserve nature.
Definitive recognition came with democracy. On 1 January 2000 the Bohemian Switzerland National Park (Národní park České Švýcarsko) was officially created, protecting some 80 km² of forests, crags, gorges and summits, including the Pravčická brána, the Kamenice gorges and the basalt hill of Růžovský vrch. It is the youngest of Czechia's four national parks. On the German side, Saxon Switzerland already had its own national park (created in 1990), so today both countries protect, each in its own way, a single cross-border landscape.
The park's philosophy combines strict conservation of the most valuable zones — where the forest is left to evolve with minimal intervention — with hiking tourism, channelled along a network of signposted routes. The aim is that millions of visitors can enjoy the landscape without destroying it: hence the rules about not leaving the trails, not lighting fires and not damaging the sandstone formations. Bohemian Switzerland thus established itself, in the twenty-first century, as one of the great natural destinations in central Europe, with the walk to the Pravčická arch and the boat ride through the gorges as its emblematic experiences.
On 24 July 2022, in the middle of a dry, hot summer, the largest forest fire in Czech history broke out in the Bohemian Switzerland National Park. The fire, probably attributed to human carelessness, spread with enormous speed through the conifer forests and the broken sandstone terrain, hard for firefighters to reach. Before it was brought under control it burned around 1,000-1,060 hectares of the park, at some points jumped the border into German Saxon Switzerland — which suffered its own great simultaneous fire — and advanced towards the area around the Pravčická brána.
The emergency was enormous. Some 450 people had to be evacuated from villages such as Hřensko, Mezná and Mezní Louka; the fire destroyed several houses in Mezná, although the inhabitants had already been brought to safety. Close to 6,000 professional and volunteer firefighters, with air support from Czech and neighbouring countries' services, fought the flames for about twenty days until they were declared out in mid-August 2022. It was a very hard blow to one of the country's best-loved natural landscapes.
The recovery since has been slow and careful. The Pravčická arch, being rock, suffered no structural damage and remained accessible, but many areas of forest were left charred and several trails had to be closed for safety — because of the risk of burned trees falling and of rockfall — and reopened gradually. The Kamenice gorges, badly affected, stayed closed until the boat rides through the Edmund Gorge could resume in July 2025, at first with a guide and with a limited daily quota of visitors. The park's scientists, for their part, are watching closely how the forest regenerates: in a sandstone ecosystem, fire is part of long natural cycles, and grasses, ferns and saplings are already sprouting on the ashes and will, in time, rebuild the forest. To visit Bohemian Switzerland today is also to witness that slow resurrection, with a responsibility to obey the fire rules strictly in a region that remains, every dry summer, vulnerable to the flames.