Saxon Switzerland National Park Germany

Legendary

Established in 1990, the park is located in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains.

Photo by Melker Wångdahl

Saxon Switzerland is not in Switzerland. It's in eastern Germany, near the Czech border, and the name is really a compliment.

In the 1760s, two Swiss painters named Adrian Zingg and Anton Graff took jobs at the art academy in Dresden. When they went exploring along the Elbe River, the cliffs and forests reminded them of home, and they started calling the region Saxon Switzerland.

The name stuck. The Czech side of the same landscape is called Bohemian Switzerland.

What those painters saw was a sea floor turned inside out. More than 100 million years ago, this area lay under shallow water, and rivers piled sand into a slab up to 600 meters thick.

The sand hardened into stone and the land rose. Then wind and water spent millions of years cutting it into towers, table mountains, and deep gorges.

The result is the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, which the park protects. Cliffs rise as much as 300 meters, and the highest peak inside the park, the Großer Winterberg, reaches 556 meters.

Painters kept coming long after Zingg and Graff. Caspar David Friedrich, one of Germany's most famous artists, painted these rocks in the early 1800s.

The most famous spot is the Bastei, a cluster of stone pinnacles standing about 195 meters above the Elbe. A wooden bridge was built between them in 1824, then replaced with the sandstone bridge that stands today in 1851.

Saxon Switzerland became a national park in 1990, just before East and West Germany reunited. It was the first national park in Germany built around rock formations rather than mountains or coastline.

It's also one of the birthplaces of modern rock climbing. Climbers here have followed strict rules since the early 1900s, using only ropes and knotted slings, never metal gear that damages the soft stone.

Walk out onto the Bastei Bridge and look down the Elbe valley, best in the first few hours after sunrise. Hike a stretch of the Malerweg, the Painters' Way, which follows the routes the Romantic artists took. Take the S-Bahn train from Dresden, which stops at several villages in the park, and ride the old ferry across the river at Rathen.