Braslaw Lakes National Park

Braslaw Lakes National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

The Braslaw Lakes are a district of blue lakes, wooded hills and quiet villages in the far north-western corner of Belarus, in the Vitebsk region, close to the borders of Latvia and Lithuania, and they are the favourite summer holiday area of the Belarusians, a landscape very like that of the neighbouring Lithuanian lake country. The small town of Braslaw, on the shore of the largest lake, is the centre, about 240 kilometres and three and a half hours by road from Minsk, with daily buses. Travellers should consult the current advice of their own governments on Belarus, which since 2022 has in many cases been to avoid travel there, and the rules on visas and border crossings, several of which with the neighbouring Union countries have been closed.

The park has its administration and a small nature museum in Braslaw, with an aviary of local animals near by, and it operates a number of recreation centres, clusters of wooden cottages and campsites on the lake shores, such as those at Drivyaty, Slobodka, Zolovo and Leoshki, which also hire rowing boats, kayaks, catamarans and bicycles and arrange licensed fishing, which is the chief occupation of many visitors. It sells a small ticket for entry to its trails and sites. The sights are modest and pleasant, and are linked by car or bicycle in a day: Castle Hill, in the middle of Braslaw, a grassy mound between two lakes with a view over the town; Mount Mayak, a few kilometres away, the best viewpoint in the district, from whose wooden tower one looks across the lakes Snudy and Strusto and their islands; the village of Slobodka, with a twin-towered church on a ridge between lakes; the old park of the Belmont estate; and several marked ecological trails of a few kilometres. Boat excursions on the larger lakes are run in the season.

Visiting Braslaw Lakes National Park: what you will see

The national park was established in September 1995 and covers about 700 square kilometres, stretching for some fifty-five kilometres from north to south. The landscape is the legacy of the last glaciation, which ended here some fifteen thousand years ago and left the most varied glacial relief in Belarus: ridges of end moraine, winding gravel ridges called eskers, which often form natural causeways between lakes, steep conical mounds, deep troughs, and great erratic boulders carried from Scandinavia, some of which bear names and legends and were venerated in pagan times. In the hollows lie the lakes, more than seventy of them within the park and some three hundred in the district, connected by streams and channels into a system that drains by the river Druika to the Western Dvina. Drivyaty, on which Braslaw stands, covers thirty-six square kilometres and is one of the largest lakes in the country; Snudy and Strusto, separated by a narrow neck of land, lie at the heart of the most picturesque group; on Strusto the large island of Chaychin has a small lake of its own in the middle of it; and South Volos, small and enclosed by steep wooded banks, is more than forty metres deep and exceptionally clear. The waters hold some thirty species of fish, including eel, which is stocked, pike-perch, pike, bream, tench and the vendace, a fish of cold, clean, deep lakes, and a relict crustacean left over from the ice age.

Forest covers nearly half the park, spruce and pine in the north, with birch, alder, and patches of broadleaved woodland, and there are large raised bogs with cranberries and cloudberries. The fauna includes elk, red and roe deer, wild boar, wolves, lynx, badgers, otters and beavers, and occasionally a brown bear wandering in from the north, and among some 200 species of birds are the black stork, the osprey, the white-tailed eagle, the black-throated diver, the crane, the eagle owl and the willow grouse, here at the southern edge of its range. Braslaw is one of the oldest towns in Belarus, first recorded in 1065 as a frontier fortress of the principality of Polotsk, and the fourteen-metre mound of Castle Hill, the site of its timber stronghold, was inhabited from the ninth century; the town later belonged to the grand duchy of Lithuania, to Poland between the two world wars, when the district was a resort for officers and officials, and its population was a mixture of Belarusians, Poles, Jews, Lithuanians, Latvians and Russian Old Believers, some of whose villages, with their prayer houses, survive in the park. The Jewish community, nearly half the town, was murdered in 1942. At Belmont, the park of a vanished palace of the counts Plater is the largest landscape park in the country.

Braslaw Lakes National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park can be visited all year. The season is the summer, from June to August, when the days are long, the air 20 to 26 degrees and the lakes warm enough for swimming, reaching about 20 to 22 degrees in July; this is when the recreation centres are full, and places should be reserved, especially for the weekend of the summer music festival held in Braslaw in July. May and early June are fresh and green, with birds nesting and few people; September brings mushrooms, berries, still, golden days and good fishing;

winter is cold and snowy, the lakes are frozen from December to March, and visitors come for ice fishing and, at some centres, the Russian bath followed by a plunge through a hole in the ice. Mosquitoes are a nuisance in early summer, and ticks, which may carry encephalitis, are present in the forests from spring to autumn. Allow two to three days. The town of Glubokoye is an hour and a half to the south-east, Polotsk, with its ancient cathedral, two and a half hours east.