    
Wonders of Nature
The Hercules' Club
Photo: www.poland.gov.pl |
The pride of the Polish flora are the powerful ancient oaks - our
natural monuments. Their trunks measure up to 13m in circumference.
They can be admired in various parts of Poland. The most famous
are the millennial Bartek, in the Swietokrzyskie Mountains, and
the 700-year-old Chrobry (named after the first Polish king) in
the Lower Silesian Forest. Europe's largest cluster of old oaks
is in Greater Poland, near Rogalin - there are almost 1000 of them
here: the oldest are over 600 years old, and the best-known are
the three sibling oaks, Lech, Czech & Rus. Poland's mineral
world comes in delightful forms - the Table Mountains, for instance:
an incredible tangle of rocky mushrooms, points, arches, drops,
cracks, great terraces and a rocky labyrinth with an area of 20
hectares. Near Cracow, in the limestone landscape of the Ojców
National Park, there is a 20m rock soaring up to the sky in the
shape of a club called Maczuga Herkulesa (Hercules' Club).
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There are 400 cavesin the vicinity. But the most beautiful caves are
Raj (Paradise) in the Swietokrzyskie Range and Niedzwiedzia (Bear) in
the Sudetan Mountains. In both, you can admire the unearthed bones of
Pleistocene animals - mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bear and cave lion,
and also bone tools - the work of Neanderthal man living 40-50 thousand
years ago. The tracks that pass through the caves are easy and manageable
even for small children. You'll see stalactites, stalagmites, columns,
flowstones, waterfalls and underground lakes emerging from the darkness.
In the Raj cave there are as many as 200 stalactites hanging from every
square metre of the ceiling. There are also worldwide rarities like anthodites
(cave pearls - spherical deposits) here.
Source: www.poland.gov.pl
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