Přírodní park Buková hora – Chýlava Protected Landscape and Regional Geography Mapping

The nature park was formally established in 1983, when the forested left-bank landscape above the Úslava river was recognized as worthy of regional protection in the Plzeň-jih district. Its designation brought together an existing patchwork of communities, hamlets, and remnant industrial sites under a single protective framework.

Long before protection, the area had a working industrial identity. It was historically a site of iron ore mining, and in later periods uranium ore extraction was also carried out within the wider territory. These mining episodes shaped local settlements such as Stará Huť and Nová Huť, whose names themselves reference the metallurgical and smelting past of the region. The park today overlays these former workings with a contemporary conservation purpose, while the village of Chýlava, which gives the park its second name, is now a depopulated, vanished settlement within the protected area.

The park occupies a rolling upland on the left bank of the Úslava, where the terrain rises from about 405 meters near Nová Huť to 651 meters at the Buková hora summit. The result is a landscape of wooded ridges, valleys, and gentle slopes rather than dramatic peaks, with the Úslava river defining the eastern boundary of the protected zone.

The substrate is made up of consolidated sediments of varied composition, producing a patchwork of soil conditions that supports the diverse woodland cover seen across the park. Although the area is largely forested, the terrain is clearly inhabited at its margins, with hamlets, roads, and railway lines framing the woodland core: the I/20 road lies along the western edge, and railway line 191 runs along the eastern side.

Vegetationally, the park is defined by acidophilous oak woodland communities, a geobotanical category characteristic of warmer, drier, often nutrient-poor sites. The canopy is built from oaks and is accompanied by characteristic companions: rowans, alder buckthorn, aspens, and birches, which together produce a varied, structurally rich forest rather than a uniform oak monoculture.

Within this broader woodland matrix sits the Chejlava National Nature Reserve, a nationally protected enclave that concentrates the park's most sensitive biodiversity and adds a higher tier of conservation significance to the surrounding regional nature park. The mix of broad forest cover, elevation change, and sedimentary substrates gives the park a meaningful gradient of habitats across a relatively compact area.

The source material does not provide detailed species inventories, so a finely resolved discussion of fauna cannot be supported. What can be said is that the park's extensive, structurally varied deciduous woodland, built around oaks, rowans, alder buckthorn, aspens, and birches, provides the kind of continuous cover and habitat diversity that supports typical Central European forest fauna, while the embedded Chejlava National Nature Reserve offers a more strictly protected refuge for the area's most sensitive species.

Conservation significance in Přírodní park Buková hora – Chýlava rests on the protection of an unusually coherent block of acidophilous oak woodland in the western Bohemian countryside, anchored by the nationally protected Chejlava National Nature Reserve within the larger park. The protected status, established in 1983, safeguards not only the forest communities but also the underlying geological substrate of consolidated, varied sediments that supports them.

The park also represents a regional counterweight to the pressures of surrounding infrastructure, sitting between the I/20 road corridor to the west and railway line 191 to the east. Its value is therefore both intrinsic, in preserving representative Bohemian oak woodland and an embedded national reserve, and contextual, in maintaining a forested buffer in a region otherwise shaped by settlement, agriculture, and transport routes.

The park is closely interwoven with its surrounding villages, including parts of Blovice such as Vlčice and Stará Huť, as well as the municipalities of Chocenice, Ždírec, Myť, Klášter, Měcholupy, and Zhůř, and smaller hamlets like Nová Huť, Hladoměř, Harvánek, Batov, Nový Mlýn, and Dubeč. The settlement names themselves, particularly Stará Huť and Nová Huť, reflect a long history of iron smelting and mining that gave the region its working character.

Within the protected area also lies Chýlava, once a living village and now a depopulated, vanished settlement that lends the park its second name. This layered history, of vanished villages, former iron works, and later uranium mining, gives the protected forest a quietly human dimension that complements its natural value.

The park's standout features include its continuous, well-preserved acidophilous oak forests stretching across roughly 28 square kilometers on the left bank of the Úslava, and the inclusion of the Chejlava National Nature Reserve as a core of stricter protection within that woodland matrix. The summit of Buková hora at 651 meters provides the highest and most defining viewpoint over the protected landscape.

Equally distinctive is the way the forested upland is framed by human geography: historic iron-mining settlements such as Stará Huť and Nová Huť, the vanished village of Chýlava, and the bordering corridors of the I/20 road and railway line 191 all give the nature park a sense of being a protected island within a deeply settled western Bohemian landscape.

The nature park's character is shaped by its deciduous oak forests, which make late spring and early summer appealing for seeing fresh leaf cover and active woodland life, while autumn brings strong color across the oaks, birches, and aspens and the most visually distinctive forest atmosphere. Winter offers quieter, more open conditions across the ridges and clearer views toward the Buková hora summit, though access will reflect general Bohemian upland weather rather than any park-specific schedule. Deciduous forest parks of this kind are best enjoyed outside the deepest summer heat, when shaded woodland walking is most comfortable.