The Braslav Lakes are seventy-four glacial lakes scattered with islands across the far northern corner of Belarus, in the Vitebsk region on the Latvian border, left where the ice sheet dropped its ridges and scooped the hollows between, and they are rowed on in the park's wooden boats, fished from plank jetties at dusk and seen whole from a tower on a hill of glacial rubble between two of the largest. The lakes are linked by streams and separated by ridges of sand and pine, and Strusto, the deepest, is dotted with islands, the largest of them Chaichyn, named for the gull colonies that nest on it now and once home to two villages whose families lived from the lake; the wooden tower on Mayak hill, on the neck of land between Snudy and Strusto, lifts the visitor clear of the pines and the district makes sense, water in every direction with the islands and the forest between, and the hill is not bedrock but a heap of rubble the glacier left. Rowing out from the shore into open water dotted with islands, the boat threads between them under the pines, and at dusk the anglers work from jetties pushed out into the reeds for perch, pike and tench.
In June the meadows and forest edges between the lakes fill with purple lupine standing waist-high against the pines, and as the ice breaks up in spring the lakes are the first open water for miles, so ducks, geese and cranes drop in by the thousand on their way north, with 217 species recorded in the park and mute swans leading cygnets along the reeds of Drivyaty. The village of Slobodka stands on a rise above the water with a tall white church of two towers that the boats steer by, and the town of Braslav on the shore of Drivyaty is the base with its castle hill. The Braslav Lakes are the ice's leftovers filled with water, and the tower is where they are counted.