‘A water world teeming with wildlife’: readers’ favourite national parks in Europe

19.04.2024 - 12:02 / theguardian.com

One of the most incredible bird scenes in Europe took place as I hiked through the Bielawa nature reserve in northern Poland, about 40 miles north of Gdansk. I had left the village of Sławoszyno via a dirt track and was heading towards Kłanino, the open countryside and fields disappearing from my sight as the hedgerows grew taller either side of me. As I stepped forward, a gap appeared in the hedge and in front of my eyes a flock of nearly 100 cranes, which had been silent, took off across the field, honking with their red-tinged heads and faces, and feathery wing feathers flapping. I could almost touch them. The 19,000-hectare (47,000-acre) park is a mix of forest, wetland and coast.
Rita

Guardian Travel readers' tips

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Tusheti national park in Georgia transports you to a lost era. A hair-raising journey over the twists, turns and sheer drops of the 2,830-metre Albano Pass delivers you into a wild, beautiful landscape with the Caucasus mountains as your backdrop. Stay in off-the-grid guesthouses with showers heated by wood-burners; homemade cheese for breakfast hosted by hardy people shaped by their rugged landscape. Walking trails wind along deserted valleys and up over the mountains. In the absence of roads, horses transport luggage and walkers just have the clean, crisp air and roaring rivers for company. This is a remote, beautiful world.
Penny

Imagine 16 interconnected lakes, surrounded by pristine forest teeming with wildlife and leading down to impressive waterfalls. I spent a day wandering this magical place. Plitvice Lakes is the oldest and largest national park in Croatia (at more than 30,000 hectares) and a Unesco world heritage site. You can explore marked trails ranging from two to eight hours. The park is open during hours of daylight. At night the park returns to the lynx, wolves, bears, snakes, bats and owls that call it home.
Susanna C

The Parc naturel régional de Corse has stunning scenery. The best way to explore it is on the hike to Lac de Nino, among Corsica’s highest lakes at 1,743 metres. You start by ascending through forest of Corsican pines, where you might be lucky enough to see the endemic Corsican nuthatch, before you clear the treeline and are surrounded by granite mountain tops. After a scree scramble you reach the lake, where mouflon (a feral subspecies of domestic sheep) graze the marshy grasses. B&B L’Auberge des Deux Sorru (doubles from €75) is a great base to explore from.
Rob Dalziel

With a day spare in Mesolongi, western Greece, and realising we were in the