“You can go through the National Park only with permission from its management, and they have set up limits, which is reasonable,” she says. “The Drawa is closed for kayakers during the bird-breeding seasons. Also the section between the Wiry lake and Prostynia is inaccessible, as it runs across a military training ground. But you may go there if the commanding officer agrees. The area is a training ground for NATO forces, so it is not easy to get the permit, but I have succeeded and encourage everyone to give it a try. It is a charming section, completely wild, without traces of civilization, one of the most beautiful on the entire trail.”

The Drawa has not undergone so much degradation as other Polish rivers. Nearly 30 fish species live there, including the roach, the perch, the gudgeon, the burbot, the salmon, the bulltrout and the trout.

“You can see Hildebrandia rivularis, which lives in clean waters, as well as sponges and bryozoa, or underwater meadows of the buttercup, Sparganium and Potamogeton in shallow backwaters,” says Monika Gdaniec. The Drawa is also home to numerous bird species, including the common goldeneye, the wagtail, and the kingfisher. The density of breeding couples of that last one is the highest in the country – 4 couples per 10 km. You can also see otters and beavers at the river.”

The abundant nature may make you oversee the interesting traces of human activity. The Drawa was a sailing route already in the 14th century. We know, for instance, that in the 18th century it was used for transporting honey from Drawsko to Frankfurt. From that century on, the river was also used on a large scale for floating wood downstream, a practice abandoned in the 1970s. You may notice over a dozen 19th-century “bindugas” – shore structures used for warehousing and preparing wood for river transport, built from ground beams. Three of them are used now as camp sites (Barnimie, Pstrąg and Kamienna).

Kamienna boasts one of the oldest operating hydro-electric power plants in Poland, with exquisite historical and technical features. Its construction started in 1896. Typical of the 19th and 20th century, it consists of a weir, a ground-built barrier, a fish ladder, a ramp for floating wood, a dam, and an electrical substation with a transformer station. The original equipment that has survived includes two hydro-power units with Francis turbines manufactured by a Swiss company Escher Wyss.

NELLY KAMIŃSKA