Braslav Lakes still holds fish that never left the Ice Age. European vendace and smelt are cold-water relicts, stranded here when the last glacier melted back from northern Belarus, and they survive only in the deepest, clearest, most oxygen-rich basins; both are now listed in the national Red Book. The same ice built everything around them. Retreating, it dumped ridges of sand and gravel and scooped hollows between them, and the meltwater filled the hollows. Seventy-four of those lakes lie inside the national park declared in 1995 — 12,590 hectares of water, about a sixth of the park's area. Drivyaty, at 36 square kilometres, is the fifth largest lake in Belarus and Snudy the eighth, while Volosa South drops past 40 metres, cold and deep enough for the relicts to hold on.
The place to take it all in is Mayak Hill, which stands about 45 metres above the water on the neck of land between Lakes Snudy and Strusto. An observation tower went up on top in 2020, and from its deck the lakes stack away in every direction, broken by islands. The largest, Chaichyn, carries a lake of its own inside it, and the gull colonies nesting there gave the island its name. Across the water the two towers of Slobodka's church, finished in 1903, rise off a low ridge above wooden village houses. In spring, as the ice breaks up, ducks, geese and cranes come down on the first open water in thousands; 217 bird species have been recorded in the park and 194 of them breed here. Today it runs as a working park — rowboats and lakeside cabins for rent, campsites among the pines, and fishing only on a paid park permit.