A rugged, sparsely populated nature park in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands that preserves one of the least human-altered landscapes in the Czech Republic.
Přírodní park Česká Kanada
Přírodní park Česká Kanada is a large protected landscape in the eastern part of the Jindřichův Hradec District of South Bohemia, in the Czech Republic. It sits on the southwestern edge of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, near the border with Lower Austria, framed roughly by the towns of Nová Bystřice, Kunžak, Český Rudolec, and Slavonice. The park covers a mosaic of forests, pastures, peat bogs, ponds, granite boulders, and gentle highlands that has been only lightly touched by modern development.
The protected area was first designated in 1994 by the Jindřichův Hradec District Office and redrawn in 2004 under a regulation of the South Bohemian Region. Its name, coined by regional writer Jaroslav Arnošt Trpák, refers to the visual similarity between this remote, damp, forested landscape and the scenery of North American Canada. The park is valued above all for the survival of a human-sparse, near-natural landscape shaped largely by the historical isolation of the former Iron Curtain border zone, which today supports a notably rich biodiversity for the region.