The sandstone towers north-east of Prague began life as sea floor. A shallow Cretaceous ocean covered central Europe some 90 million years ago, depositing quartz sand that hardened, lifted, then split along fault lines into the rock towns walkers thread today. Erosion did the carving.
A Bohemian Paradise tour from Prague crosses that geological boundary within an hour of leaving the capital, as Elbe farmland gives way to pine, gritstone and weathered basalt.
The region was named Český ráj in the nineteenth century by spa guests at Sedmihorky, who borrowed the phrase from an earlier religious community. Formal protection followed in 1955, when the area became the first protected landscape region declared in the Czech lands. The protected landscape area itself covers 182 square kilometres, a small figure for a region that carries four castles, three rock towns and a working gemstone town. In 2005 it entered the UNESCO Global Geoparks network, the first Czech territory to do so. Turnov anchors it administratively and historically: the town has cut garnet and Czech gemstones since the sixteenth century, and its lapidary trade still supplies workshops across Bohemia. At Dolánky u Turnova, a timber farmstead from 1794 stands beside the Jizera, near the Bohemian Paradise House of Nature visitor centre.
Castles read the terrain rather than defy it. Trosky sits on two volcanic necks, its towers named Panna and Baba, raised in the late fourteenth century by Čeněk of Vartenberk and left ruined after 1648. Valdštejn, founded around 1260, gave the Wallenstein family its name. Kost guards the Plakánek valley in near-complete Gothic form, while the neo-Gothic chateau at Hrubá Skála looks straight down onto its rock town. Bohemian Paradise tour from Prague tours generally string these points together along the ridge road.
Climbers arrived early. Prachov Rocks and Hrubá Skála have carried marked sandstone routes since the first decade of the twentieth century, governed by an ethic that bans metal protection in soft rock. Mount Kozákov, 744 metres, still yields agate and jasper to collectors. Westward, the same Cretaceous seabed resurfaces as the Elbe sandstone of Saxon Switzerland, which is why a Bohemian Paradise tour from Prague tour is often paired with a cross-border itinerary. Two countries, one vanished sea.
8 hr 30 min
