Aukštaitija National Park holds 126 lakes, and streams and narrow channels link enough of them that a canoe can cross the park for days without touching a road. Retreating Ice Age glaciers dug the hollows and left the gravel ridges between them, and Lithuania made this its first national park in 1974 — then simply the Lithuanian SSR National Park, renamed for the Aukštaitija region in 1991. Forest covers more than 70 percent of its 410 square kilometres, four-fifths of it pine, and some stands have been growing for two hundred years. The water goes deep as well as wide: Tauragnas drops 60.5 metres, deeper than any other lake in the country, while Kretuonas spreads widest. From the top of Ladakalnis, a 176-metre hill with a wooden platform on it, six lakes lie in view at once — the panorama the park is known by.
Push a canoe out from Palūšė and the park drops to water level: reed beds, herons holding still in the shallows, channels barely wider than the boat. Above the little harbour stands the church that gives the park its logo and once appeared on the one-litas banknote — St Joseph's, raised in 1750 without a single iron nail, its octagonal belfry the only one of its kind in Lithuania. The villages carry the rest of the story. The water mill at Ginučiai ground grain on the Srovė until 1968 and is the one mill of the park's six to keep its original machinery. At Stripeikiai, a village first named in 1357, hollowed tree trunks that held bees from the 15th century to the early 1900s now stand among the pines. Fifteen people still live at Šuminai on Lake Baluošas, all of them sharing the village's name, in timber farmsteads the park protects as they stand.