Łeba Beach

Łeba sits on the Polish Baltic coast between two lakes, with the Słowiński National Park immediately west of the town. The beach runs along the front of the park and behind it stands the largest system of moving dunes in Europe.

The dunes are the reason for the park, designated in 1967 and a UNESCO biosphere reserve since 1977. Wind pushes them east at a rate of several metres a year, and they have buried forest as they travel — dead trunks emerge from the sand where the dune has passed over and moved on. Łącka Góra, the largest, stands over forty metres. The area was used as a German rocket testing range during the Second World War, and concrete remains of it are still in the dunes.

The beach itself is wide, fine, pale quartz sand on a shallow Baltic shore with no tide to speak of, small waves and brackish water that reaches about 20°C in August. It is swimmable for perhaps eight weeks a year and bracing the rest of the time. Amber washes up after storms and people walk the tideline looking for it.

Development is a small resort town at the eastern end — hotels, a port, a promenade — and then nothing at all inside the park, which is reached on foot, by bicycle or by electric shuttle from Rąbka. Walking on the marked routes is required; the dune vegetation is what holds the whole system in place. The Rowokół and Czołpino dunes further west are the quieter parts of the same system, and the lakes behind — Łebsko and Gardno — were sea bays that the moving sand closed off, which is the clearest evidence of how far these dunes have travelled.

Dunes that move east several metres a year and have buried forest doing it — dead trunks stand out of the sand where one has passed over. Marked paths only, because the vegetation is what holds the system. The Baltic is twenty degrees in August for about eight weeks and bracing for the other forty-four.