Adršpach Rock City spent centuries hidden inside a forest, until the forest burned down. A fire in 1824 ran through these woods for weeks, stripped the slopes to bare stone and left a labyrinth of sandstone towers standing in the open; the first paths were cut soon after. The rock is far older: quartz sand settled on the floor of a shallow sea about 89 million years ago, then hardened, lifted and cracked along a grid of joints, and water, frost and wind widened those cracks into corridors until only the towers were left. The tallest, the Lovers, stands 81.4 metres. Some balance upside down — the Sugarloaf is 13 metres across at the top and barely 3 at its base. The gorges between them trap cold air that never drains away, so mountain spruce grows on the shaded floors while pine dries out on the sunlit rims. The rock city has been a protected reserve since 1933.
You walk it as a circuit of about 3.5 kilometres, on boardwalks and stairways that thread slots as narrow as the Mouse Hole, a gap of 50 centimetres. Midway the rock opens onto a small lake, where a flat-bottomed pram carries you across and the walls throw the boatman's voice back at you. That lake also feeds the Great Waterfall: a sluice holds the water and lets it go in a 16-metre drop, and every winter the fall freezes into an icefall. Near the entrance a second lake, glass-clear, fills a sand quarry worked until 1971. Peregrine falcons nest on these walls from late March to the end of June — only about forty pairs breed successfully in the whole country — and the path below the Cathedral Walls closes while they sit on eggs. Entry is now ticketed and capped: summer dates sell out online, and nothing is sold at the gate.