The Other Czech Mountains: Eight Slow Days in the Beskids and Wallachia

Some Czech mountains became international destinations long ago.

The Beskids somehow escaped that fate.

Drive east, almost as far as Czechia goes, and the familiar tourist map begins to thin out. Prague is far behind. So are the famous trails of the Krkonoše and Šumava mountains.

Ahead lies a different mountain world.

Long forested ridges rise above deep valleys. Wooden houses appear on steep meadows. Sheep graze beneath the hills. Mountain streams tumble through moss-covered gorges. Somewhere above them all, a strange pagan god waits beside a path.

And dominating the landscape is Lysá hora – the highest mountain of the Moravian-Silesian Beskids.

For Czech hikers, these mountains need little introduction. For foreign visitors, they are another story.

Perhaps that is precisely why you should come.

For the next eight days, we will do something wonderfully simple. Find somewhere to stay around Ostravice, unpack your bags and leave them there.

No hotel hopping. No race across Moravia.

Just mountains, forests and a slow introduction to Wallachia – one of the most distinctive corners of Czechia.

Days 1–2 – Arrive slowly, then climb the quieter mountain

Getting to the Beskids from Prague takes time.

Accept it.

Do not arrive in the afternoon and immediately try to squeeze a mountain into what remains of the day. Check in, walk through Ostravice, find somewhere for dinner and look up at the forested slopes surrounding the valley.

Leave them alone.

Tomorrow they can have you.

And for the first proper hiking day, resist the obvious choice.

Everybody talks about Lysá hora.

Instead, climb Smrk.

At 1,276 metres, it is the second-highest mountain in the Moravian-Silesian Beskids. A good circuit from Ostravice is around 14 kilometres – enough for your legs to understand that the holiday has begun, but still a gentler introduction than tackling Lysá hora straight away.

There is something wonderfully appropriate about beginning with number two.

Smrk is quieter than its famous neighbour. Much of the pleasure comes not from reaching a summit surrounded by attractions, but from the climb itself: forest, roots, changing light and the gradual disappearance of the valley below.

This is your introduction to the Beskids.

Not spectacular architecture.

Not a checklist.

A path through the forest.

Days 3–4 – Water beneath the mountains, then the mountain above them all

After yesterday's climb, Day 3 should feel easier.

Drive the few kilometres to Malenovice and walk towards the Satina Waterfalls.

Calling them waterfalls almost gives the wrong impression. Do not expect one monumental curtain of water. Satina has cut a small rocky gorge beneath Lysá hora, filled with cascades, pools, boulders and forest.

Continue through the landscape towards U Veličků, an old mountain pub whose history reaches back to 1825. There is even a local saying that roughly translates as: if you haven't been to U Veličků, you haven't been to the Beskids.

That sounds like a perfectly reasonable excuse for lunch.

Then go home.

Seriously.

It would be easy to add another attraction in the afternoon.

Don't.

Sit somewhere in Ostravice. Have coffee. Read. Find water if the day is hot. Watch clouds gathering over the mountains.

Because tomorrow you will climb the one you have been looking at since you arrived.

Lysá hora.

At 1,323 metres, it is the highest mountain in the Moravian-Silesian Beskids. One of the classic routes starts directly in Ostravice, so Day 4 requires almost no logistics.

Leave your temporary home on foot.

And go up.

The trail climbs through forest over roots and stones before finally emerging onto the summit. On a clear day, mountain ranges seem to pile up behind one another on the horizon; in exceptional conditions, the view reaches all the way to the Tatras.

But don't come only for the panorama.

Lysá hora matters here in a way that certain mountains matter to the people who live beneath them. It is climbed again and again, in every season and almost every kind of weather.

Have something warm at the top. If you find valašská kyselica, the hearty sour soup of the region, this is a good place to try it.

Then walk back down.

There is no second attraction today.

There shouldn't be.

Day 5 – Štramberk, where the mountains become a town

Your legs deserve civilisation.

But let's choose an unusually beautiful version of it.

Drive to Štramberk, a small town of steep lanes, timbered houses and old roofs clustered beneath a cylindrical castle tower known as Trúba.

The place feels as though somebody compressed several layers of the region into one hillside: folk architecture, castle ruins, views, beer and one extremely peculiar pastry.

The Štramberk ears are made from honey-spiced dough and shaped like human ears. Their name is connected with a gruesome local legend dating back to the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century.

Buy some.

Then climb to Trúba and look back towards the mountains where you have spent the previous days.

If you want one modern counterpoint, neighbouring Kopřivnice has the Tatra museum and the remarkable Slovenská strela railway motor car.

But consider it optional.

If Štramberk has seduced you into a long lunch and another walk through its lanes, let it win.

Slow travel occasionally requires the courage to miss a museum.

Day 6 – Soláň and the valleys of Wallachia

Today the landscape changes.

Head towards Soláň, where the Beskids reveal their softer side.

Instead of one dominant summit, there are long green ridges, meadows, scattered wooden houses and broad views across a landscape that feels inhabited without ever feeling crowded.

Walk.

There is no need to conquer anything today.

Soláň is closely associated with artists and Wallachian traditions, and it makes a beautiful transition from the mountain wilderness of the first half of the week to the human landscape of the second.

Then continue to Velké Karlovice.

Do not come here looking for one great monument. The attraction is the valley itself: wooden houses, old farmsteads, meadows climbing towards forested slopes and a culture shaped for centuries by life in the mountains.

This is also a good day to take local food seriously.

Try frgál, the large round Wallachian tart traditionally filled with pear, poppy seed, curd cheese or plum. Look for local cheeses. Order kyselica if you haven't already.

Food is not an interruption to today's sightseeing.

It is part of it.

Stay long enough for the afternoon light to begin changing the hills, then return to Ostravice.

By now, the drive back should feel different from the first evening.

You know where you are going.

You know where you will have dinner.

Perhaps somebody recognises you.

This is the moment when accommodation begins to become a temporary home.

Day 7 – Pustevny, Radegast, Radhošť and the wooden world below

For the penultimate day, the Beskids become almost theatrical.

Start at Pustevny.

At more than a thousand metres above sea level, the mountain saddle takes its name from the hermits who once lived here. Later came some of the most remarkable buildings in the Czech mountains: colourful timber structures designed by architect Dušan Jurkovič, inspired by Carpathian and Wallachian folk architecture.

From Pustevny, follow the ridge towards Radhošť.

Sooner or later you will meet him.

Radegast.

The strange statue beside the path represents a pagan deity traditionally associated with these mountains. History, folklore and later mythology have become thoroughly entangled around him, which is perhaps exactly as it should be.

Walk on.

At the summit of Radhošť stands the chapel of Saints Cyril and Methodius, Christian missionaries whose tradition here became intertwined with much older stories of the mountain.

Then descend from legends back into human life.

Spend the rest of the day in Rožnov pod Radhoštěm.

The Wallachian Open Air Museum is not simply another museum to add to the list. By now it should feel almost like an explanation of everything you have been seeing for a week.

The timbered houses.

The farmsteads.

The mountain economy.

The crafts.

The relationship between people and this difficult but beautiful landscape.

For six days, you have been walking through Wallachia.

Here you begin to understand how people lived in it.

And when evening comes, return once more to Ostravice.

One last familiar road home.

Day 8 – From wooden Wallachia to Baťa's city

There is one more piece missing.

And it looks almost nothing like what came before.

Leave the mountains behind and head south.

If you like, stop around Hrachovec for a proper Wallachian frgál. It is a small detour, and an excellent way to say goodbye to traditional Wallachia before entering a very different world.

Then continue to Zlín.

After a week of forests, wooden houses, mountain ridges and old villages, the contrast is startling.

Red brick.

Straight lines.

Factories.

Functionalism.

A city transformed in the twentieth century by Tomáš Baťa and his extraordinary industrial enterprise.

Walk through the former factory complex. Look at the regular grid of buildings. Find the famous Baťa skyscraper and its legendary lift that served as an office. Notice the characteristic brick houses built for workers.

For seven days, you have been discovering how landscape helped shape Wallachia.

On the final day, you discover how industry helped reshape part of that same region.

And suddenly the detour to Zlín doesn't feel like a detour at all.

It is the other end of the story.

The mountains beyond the usual map

The Beskids are not undiscovered.

Czechs know them very well.

On a sunny weekend, you certainly won't have Lysá hora or Pustevny to yourself.

But international tourism has a strange habit of concentrating travellers in the same handful of places. Visitors looking for Czech mountains head towards the Krkonoše. Or Šumava.

The Beskids wait much farther east.

Perhaps that is why they deserve eight days rather than a hurried excursion.

Because what remains afterwards is not simply a collection of peaks.

It is the smell of wet forest on Smrk.

Water running over rock beneath Lysá hora.

An old pub hidden among the trees.

A frgál eaten in a valley you had never heard of a week earlier.

Wooden houses scattered across green hillsides.

Radegast waiting beside a mountain path.

And finally, the almost surreal geometry of Baťa's red-brick city after a week in the mountains.

You arrived because the Beskids were somewhere new.

Eight days later, you know which mountain lies beyond the window, which road leads into the valley and where you want to eat when you get back to Ostravice.

You came to see another part of Czechia.

For a little while, you lived there.