The Ciśniańsko-Wetliński Landscape Park is one of the wildest corners of the Polish Carpathians — a vast protected area of over 51,000 hectares nestled in the Western Bieszczady Mountains, right on the western doorstep of the Bieszczady National Park. If you are after dense forests, mountain silence, and a genuine chance of spotting a bear or wolf in the wild, this is your place.
The park forms part of the International Biosphere Reserve 'Eastern Carpathians' together with its neighbouring protected areas, including the Bieszczady National Park and the San Valley Landscape Park. The terrain is dominated by ancient forests — 83% of the park is wooded — broken up by meadows, streams, and rocky ridges. The highest peaks reach nearly 1,200 m above sea level and display a classic altitudinal zonation of mountain vegetation. Autumn sets the beech forests ablaze with colour, summer brings lush greenery, and winter wraps everything in peaceful snow — every season reveals a different side of this remarkable landscape.
How to get thereBack in the 1930s, villages like Cisna and Komańcza were popular holiday resorts with guesthouses and well-marked trails. The wartime upheaval emptied these valleys entirely — and it is precisely that decades-long absence of human activity that gifted this land its extraordinary, almost untouched wildness today.