Morskie Oko is the largest lake in the Tatra Mountains of southern Poland, the Eye of the Sea, a sheet of emerald water in a bowl of granite at 1,395 metres under the highest peaks in the country, and it is reached only on foot or by horse cart, which is why the whole nation seems to walk up to it. The road in is a nine-kilometre valley walk from the car park at Palenica, between walls of spruce, and the górale coachmen of the highlands, who have worked this valley for generations, take it at a walking pace with their horse carts, or sleighs in winter, for those who do not walk. The lake appears at the end, ringed by the granite headwall of the Mięguszowieckie peaks with Rysy, the highest point in Poland, at the back, and a mountain hut on the shore that has stood there since 1908. A short scramble to an iron cross on the rock above the hut opens the whole lake at once, the emerald surface, the wall and the peaks doubled in the water.
A near-level path rings the shore in under an hour, trading the crowded viewpoint for quiet gravel beaches and the sound of water off the cliffs, and from the far shore a rough trail switchbacks up a steep hour to Czarny Staw, the Black Pond, a darker, higher lake in its own bowl under Rysy that feeds Morskie Oko below. The lake once carried the odd name of Fish Lake, for the trout that live at this height, and it was the prize in a border dispute between Hungary and Galicia, settled in 1902 not on the mountain but in a courtroom in Graz. In autumn the larch flares gold among the dark spruce, and in winter the basin fills with snow and the lake freezes solid, drawing the year's biggest crowds though the ice is unsafe to walk on. Morskie Oko is the lake Poland climbs to, and the eye in its name has been open for ten thousand years.