Wielkopolska National Park — the ice age on Poznań's doorstep

Thirty-five years in the making

The idea of protecting the woods around Lake Góreckie came in 1922 from the Poznań botanist Adam Wodziczko, who effectively established nature conservation as a discipline in its own right in Poland. A reserve was symbolically marked out in 1933, but the national park itself was not created until 16 April 1957 — thirty-five years after the first proposal, and twelve years after a war that had thinned these forests badly.

The park began at a little over 52 km² and now covers 75.8 km², with a buffer zone of comparable size around it. It lies in Greater Poland Voivodeship, in the triangle between Luboń, Stęszew and Mosina, roughly fifteen kilometres south of central Poznań.

That proximity is both the park's advantage and its difficulty. This is the most easily reached national park in Poland — you can get there on a suburban train and be back the same day — but visitor numbers run into the hundreds of thousands a year, which tells on seventy-five square kilometres. Hence the eighteen strictly protected areas, some 260 hectares in total, closed to visitors and sitting like islands within the rest of the park.

What the ice sheet left behind

The whole landscape is a textbook record of the last glaciation. The Scandinavian ice retreated from here more than ten thousand years ago and left the full inventory of forms: terminal and ground moraines, eskers — long narrow ridges built up by rivers running in crevasses within the ice — kames, dunes, and the deep troughs that now hold the lakes.

The ground is low: the highest point, Osowa Góra, reaches a little over 130 metres. Even so, the drop between the crest of an esker and the floor of a trough is surprisingly pronounced, and you climb and descend more here than the map suggests, particularly on the paths along the lakes.

The ice also carried in erratic boulders from Scandinavia, scattered right across the park. The largest, known as the Foresters' Boulder (Głaz Leśników), measures nearly 10.5 metres around and is protected as a natural monument. To a geologist a stone like that is a travelogue: the rock it is made of occurs nowhere naturally in Poland.

Lakes, and a ruin on an island

More than a dozen lakes lie inside the park, arranged in distinctive chains because they all occupy the floors of the same glacial troughs. The best known are Góreckie, Budzyńskie, Kociołek, Witobelskie, Dymaczewskie, Jarosławieckie and Rosnowskie; the smallest, Żabiak, is more pool than lake.

Lake Góreckie is the park's calling card: about a hundred hectares of water, depths reaching 17 metres, steep wooded shores and two islands. On the larger one, Castle Island, stand the ruins of a romantic folly built in the nineteenth century for Klaudyna Potocka, née Działyńska. It was never a fortress — it was meant from the outset to ornament the view, and as a ruin it still does.

On the shore, in the village of Jeziory, the park runs a natural history museum. Starting there makes sense, because without some idea of what an esker and a trough actually are, this landscape reads as nothing more than undulating woodland.

The park in numbers

• Plants — over 900 species of vascular plants, plus around 170 mosses and 120 lichens; pine makes up close to 70 per cent of the tree cover, a legacy of earlier forestry.
• Birds — more than 180 species; lakes fringed with reeds and old trees by the water bring woodland and wetland species together in a small area.
• Mammals — over forty species, from red deer, roe deer and wild boar to bats using cellars and old trees.
• Insects — more than three thousand species recorded, many times the total of all vertebrates combined.
• Fungi — close to three hundred species, a good share of them tied to old wood that nobody clears from the strictly protected areas.

Getting there

• By train — the easiest option by far: take a local service from Poznań towards Wolsztyn and get off at Puszczykowo, Puszczykówko or Mosina; the trail starts a few minutes from the platform.
• By car — approach via Stęszew, Mosina or Luboń; at weekends the car parks at popular entrances fill up before midday.
• By bicycle — reachable on cycle paths from the southern districts of Poznań, with designated routes inside the park; riding off them is not allowed.
• On foot — several marked trails totalling a few dozen kilometres let you assemble anything from a two-hour loop to a full day out.

Practical advice

The commonest mistake is treating this place as a city forest. The strictly protected areas are signed and genuinely closed, and their boundaries sometimes run a few metres from the path, so wandering off to pick mushrooms or cut a corner is an offence rather than an oversight. Mushrooms and berries are not collected in a national park at all.

If you have time for one walk only, take the ground around Lake Góreckie, with the view across to Castle Island and a climb onto the esker along the shore. It is the shortest route to understanding why this landscape was judged worth protecting, when from the air it looks like the ordinary Greater Poland patchwork of woods and fields.

Weekends from May to September are simply busy — this park is the walking ground for a metropolitan area of several hundred thousand people. A weekday, or an early start, changes the experience completely on exactly the same route.

How to get there and practical info

Location

Greater Poland Voivodeship, in the Luboń – Stęszew – Mosina triangle, about 15 km south of Poznań

Area

75.8 km², including 18 strictly protected areas totalling some 260 hectares

Established

1957

Highest point

Osowa Góra, a little over 130 metres

Time needed

from two hours on a short loop to a full day on a longer trail

Arriving without a car

local train from Poznań to Puszczykowo, Puszczykówko or Mosina

Current opening times and tickets

the park's official website

When to go