Šumava 2026

Day one is mostly the drive, and it is better than it sounds. We leave after lunch and head south via Brno and České Budějovice, ordinary motorway and main road for most of the way across the farmland of the Vysočina and down into South Bohemia. The landscape only really turns after Prachatice: the hills close in, the fields shrink to clearings, and the beech and spruce thicken until the road is running through forest. If there is still daylight when we pass through Prachatice, its Renaissance square is worth twenty minutes — this was the salt town at the Bohemian end of the Golden Trail, and the merchants' money is still on the house fronts in painted sgraffito. Then the last stretch to Volary, where we check in at Penzion Sněžná and walk the car out of our legs. Volary is not a pretty town and does not need to be, since it is only our base, but it has something no other town in Bohemia has: a handful of long, low timber houses with wooden galleries, built in the manner of the Alps by settlers who came from there. They are worth a look in the last of the light. Dinner close by, and an early night, because tomorrow is the long day.

Today is the reason for the trip. After breakfast we drive a short way to the foot of Boubín and walk into Boubínský prales, a forest that has been protected since 1858 and was barely touched for more than a century before that. The path follows a stream up to a small, dark pond that looks natural and was in fact dammed in the 1830s to float timber down to the glassworks, and from its dam the trail loops around the fenced core of the old forest. This is what Central European woodland looked like before anyone managed it: spruce, fir and beech three and four hundred years old, fallen trunks left exactly where they came down, and young trees standing on stilt roots where an old one has rotted away beneath them. In drizzle it is, if anything, better. About eight kilometres and three hours later we are back at the car, and a few minutes later in Lenora, the village that grew up around that glassworks. After lunch we walk across the covered wooden bridge over the Vltava, built in 1870 and one of the few of its kind still standing. The afternoon belongs to Soumarské rašeliniště, a peat bog in the Vltava floodplain just west of Volary, where a boardwalk crosses rust-coloured grass and birch to a lookout over the whole valley. It was mined for peat until around 2000 and is slowly being allowed to turn back into a bog, and the medieval salt caravans of the Golden Trail forded the river right here. Low cloud suits it. We are back in Volary before dark, with a stroll past the old timber houses if anyone still has the legs for it.

The only early start of the weekend, and it pays for itself. We check out early and drive the fifty minutes to Český Krumlov, one of the most visited towns in Central Europe, which is exactly why we want to be there first thing, while it still belongs to the people who live there. A first loop through the empty streets: náměstí Svornosti, the main square, then across the river and up through Latrán, the old quarter below the castle, with the round painted tower above us the whole way. At ten we have the weekend's one booking, the Baroque Castle Theatre. It was rebuilt in the 1760s and, almost uniquely, never modernised afterwards, so the painted scenery, the costumes and the wooden machinery under the stage that could change a whole scene in a few seconds are all still there; only Drottningholm in Sweden has anything like it. From the theatre we carry on through the upper castle courtyards and over the Cloak Bridge, a stacked, multi-storey bridge high above a ravine, into the castle garden, and look back over the red roofs and the tight bend of the Vltava — the view of Krumlov everyone has seen without knowing where it was taken from. If there is time before lunch, Seidel's old photo studio across the river is a quiet, curious extra. We eat early, ahead of the midday rush, and drive home via České Budějovice in the afternoon.