THE ARCH
Pravčická brána: Europe's Largest Sandstone Arch
The dimensions, why you can't walk on it, the fairy-tale chalet beneath it, the Narnia connection and how it was formed.
See Bohemian Switzerland tours on GetYourGuide ↗A stone ribbon, 26 metres across
Pravčická brána is the largest natural sandstone arch in Europe, and its statistics explain everything about how you experience it. The arch spans 26.5 metres and rises 16 metres on the inside, but the band of rock actually bearing that load is only about three metres thick at its slenderest. It is, in effect, a stone ribbon thrown across a gap — far more delicate than photographs suggest, and that delicacy is the key to the single most common visitor question.
Why you can't walk on it
You cannot walk over the top of the arch, and haven't been able to since 1982. Decades of visitors climbing across it wore the soft sandstone down to the point where authorities closed the top to protect the arch from collapse. Today you admire it from the viewing terraces below and beside it, at the Falcon's Nest chalet — which is genuinely the better vantage, giving you the whole span in profile against the sky rather than a view of your own feet. If you've seen photos of people standing on top, they're either old or, as with the Narnia film, faked.
The Falcon's Nest
Tucked directly beneath the arch is Sokolí hnízdo, the 'Falcon's Nest' — a fairy-tale mountain chalet built in 1881 by Prince Edmund of Clary-Aldringen, originally as a lodge with fifty beds and now a restaurant with viewing terraces and a small museum. It's the reason there's a gate and a modest entry fee at the arch: the terrain has been privately owned since the old hotel was privatised. The same prince gave his name to the Edmund's Gorge downstream, tying the two halves of the day together.
Narnia's front door
The arch had a brush with cinema fame in 2005, when landscape scenes for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe were filmed here. Fittingly, given the climbing ban, the shots of characters running across the top of the arch were done on a studio set and composited in — you still can't walk it, not even for Hollywood. The scene where Lucy meets Mr Tumnus was shot at the nearby Tisá Rocks, another sandstone labyrinth worth knowing about if the geology grabs you.
How it got here
The arch is a survivor. The sandstone it's made of was laid down on the floor of a Cretaceous sea about a hundred million years ago, then exposed when the sea drained and cracked into a grid of joints by tectonic stress. Over millions of years water, wind and frost widened those cracks, dissolving the softer stone and leaving harder-cemented fins standing. Pravčická brána is one such fin, hollowed through the middle — the last of a block of rock whose surroundings have long since eroded away. Standing under it, you're looking at deep time made visible.
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