Ancient and Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and Other Regions of Europe
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How it came to be
European beech survived each ice age in refuges in the south, and about 11,000 years ago it began to spread north and west from them. The expansion took only a few thousand years and is still going on, and these largely undisturbed forests record it.
The site was inscribed in 2007 as the primeval beech forests of the Carpathians, ten massifs along a 185 km axis from the Rakhiv mountains and the Chornohora ridge in Ukraine to the Vihorlat Mountains in Slovakia. Five forests in Germany, 4,391 ha in all, were added in 2011. Forests in nine more countries, Spain among them, followed in 2017, and forests in eight countries, including France, Switzerland and Poland, in 2021.
Today the property has 93 component parts in 18 countries, the largest being Uholka-Shyrokyi Luh in Ukraine at 11,860 ha. Spain's six components, added in 2017, lie in the beech forests of Ayllón, Navarra and the Picos de Europa.
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