Saxon Switzerland

Saxon Switzerland (Sächsische Schweiz) is not a mountain range in the usual sense. It is a sandstone plateau on the Elbe, cut by the river and its tributaries into a maze of table-topped towers, gorges and cliffs, and known formally as the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. Its highest point on the German side, the Großer Zschirnstein, reaches only 562 metres; inside the national park itself, the high point is the Großer Winterberg, at 556 metres. Height was never really the appeal. The name arose in the eighteenth century, after two Swiss-born artists called to the Dresden academy in 1766, Adrian Zingg and Anton Graff, compared the rock scenery to home in their letters; the term only spread widely after a guidebook by the theologian Wilhelm Leberecht Götzinger popularised it in 1804.

A national park since 1990

The Sächsische Schweiz National Park was established on 1 October 1990, shortly after German reunification, and covers the Saxon side of the range along the Czech border. It adjoins the Bohemian Switzerland (České Švýcarsko) National Park across the frontier, where the Pravčická brána, a 26.5-metre sandstone arch, is the largest natural rock arch in Europe; erosion from decades of foot traffic closed it to walking on top in 1982, though it can still be seen from below and from nearby viewpoints. On the Saxon side, the Bastei is the most visited single feature: a cluster of rock pinnacles linked since 1851 by a stone bridge across a 40-metre gorge, reached from the village of Rathen by a small passenger ferry across the Elbe, since no road bridge crosses the river there. The flat-topped Lilienstein, visible from the Bastei, is the park’s official symbol.

The climbing tradition

Saxon Switzerland claims Germany’s oldest tradition of free climbing outside the Alps, dating to an 1864 first ascent of the Falkenstein tower. Its rules, set down in writing in 1913 by Rudolf Fehrmann and barely changed since, are stricter than almost anywhere else in the sport. Metal protection of any kind, cams, nuts, pitons, is banned to protect the soft sandstone; climbers rely instead on knotted slings wedged into cracks, with only occasional fixed rings placed by the first ascensionist on harder routes. Chalk is also banned. The result is a style built on route-finding and nerve rather than equipment, spread across more than 1,100 named summits and over 17,000 recorded routes, graded on a local Roman-numeral scale running from I to XIc.

Walking without climbing

Away from the crags, waymarked paths thread the gorges and climb to viewpoints, including the Bastei, without any climbing at all. The paths are narrow in places, and around the best-known viewpoints they can get busy: a comparatively recent problem, unlike the rock and its rules. Kurort Rathen station, on the Dresden S-Bahn, stands beside the Oberrathen ferry terminal for the crossing to the village.