Soderasen National Park

Soderasen National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Soderasen is a ridge of ancient rock rising out of the fertile plain of Scania, the southernmost province of Sweden, and its national park protects one of the largest continuous tracts of broadleaved forest in northern Europe, cut by surprisingly deep ravines, in a part of the country otherwise known for wheat fields and castles. It lies about forty-five minutes by road north-east of the port of Helsingborg, an hour from Malmo and an hour and a half from Copenhagen, across the bridge, and in summer a bus runs from the railway stations of the district to the main entrance, though a car is the usual means. Entry is free. The park has two entrances, a few kilometres apart. The principal one is at Skaralid, near the village of Ljungbyhed, where there are a large car park, a visitor centre, called the Naturum, with an exhibition, guided walks and a cafe, and, a few steps from the door, a small, still lake lying at the mouth of the great ravine, enclosed by wooded slopes.

From it a level path, partly boarded, suitable for pushchairs and, for the first stretch, for wheelchairs, follows the stream up the floor of the ravine under beech trees, between scree slopes and crags, and a steep path, with many steps, climbs in about twenty minutes to the viewpoint of Kopparhatten, the copper hat, on the rim ninety metres above, which can also be reached by car, and which gives the celebrated view down the length of the forested gorge. The second entrance, at Rostanga, a village known for its inn, gives access to the Nackarp ravine, to the Odensjon, a perfectly round little lake in a deep hollow, and to walks along the Kvarkabacken stream. Marked circuits of between one and fifteen kilometres link all these, the Skaneleden long-distance trail passes through, with shelters for overnight stays, and the Hjortspranget lookout is another fine viewpoint.

Visiting Soderasen National Park: what you will see

The national park was inaugurated in 2001 and covers about sixteen square kilometres on the northern side of the Soderasen, the southern ridge, a horst, that is, a block of the earth's crust some forty kilometres long and up to two hundred metres high, which was pushed up between faults along a great line of weakness in the bedrock of northern Europe, a zone that runs diagonally across Scania and marks the boundary between the ancient, stable shield of Scandinavia and the younger rocks of the continent. It is built of gneiss, some seventeen hundred million years old, shot through with dark dykes of diabase, and its summit, flat and wooded, reaches 212 metres, the highest point of the province. Into its steep northern edge streams have cut a system of ravines, of which the Skaralid gorge, some six kilometres long and up to ninety metres deep, is the largest. How they were formed is still discussed by geologists: they follow cracks in the rock opened by the movements along the fault, and were enlarged, it is thought, less by ice than by frost, which during the cold periods of the ice ages shattered the exposed rock walls, producing the great aprons of angular scree that lie beneath the crags, and by the streams, which carried the debris away.

Their steep, inaccessible slopes could never be ploughed and were difficult to log, which is why they have kept their forest, a southern, continental kind of forest that is rare in Sweden, dominated by beech, with oak, ash, elm, lime, maple and alder, in every stage of growth and decay, many of the trees being old and hollow, and the ground is strewn with fallen trunks. In late April and early May, before the beeches come into leaf, the floor of the forest is white with wood anemones, a sight for which people travel from all over southern Sweden, followed by the brief, luminous green of the new beech leaves. The dead wood and the shaded, humid rock faces make the park one of the richest places in the country for the inconspicuous forms of life, mosses, lichens, fungi and wood-living beetles, of which hundreds of rare species have been recorded, many of them otherwise unknown in Scandinavia, and the clean, cold streams hold the larvae of rare insects, trout and the grey wagtail. The birds include the black woodpecker, the stock dove, the tawny owl, the red kite, which is common in this part of Scania, the raven and the nutcracker, and roe deer, red deer, fallow deer, wild boar, badgers, pine martens, hazel dormice and a dozen species of bats inhabit the forest. The Odensjon, thirty metres across its steep surrounding hollow and nineteen metres deep, was long taken for the crater of a volcano or a meteorite; it is now explained as a hollow scooped out by a small local glacier, and legend makes it bottomless and sacred to Odin.

Soderasen National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open all year, and the visitor centre for most of it, with shorter hours in winter. The two great seasons are spring and autumn. The wood anemones flower from about mid-April to early May, and the beeches come into leaf in the first half of May, when the forest is at its most beautiful and the paths at Skaralid are crowded at weekends and on the first of May. In October the beech woods turn gold, copper and orange, the second high point of the year, best seen from Kopparhatten in the middle of the month.

Summer is green, shady and cool under the canopy, 18 to 22 degrees, and good for families; winter is quiet, often misty, with snow only occasionally, the bare trees opening the views and the structure of the ravines. The paths on the slopes are steep, stony and slippery with wet leaves in autumn. Allow half a day. The inn at Rostanga, the castles of Scania, Helsingborg and its ferry to Elsinore, and the university town of Lund are all within an hour.