 Environment |
Adjoining Austria, Germany, Poland and the Slovak Republic, the Czech Republic consists of Bohemia in the west and Moravia in the east. Within Moravia is a small southern part of the historical region called Silesia, the rest of which is in present-day Poland. Prague, the capital of both the Czech Republic and Bohemia, sits astride the Vltava River about 30km above its junction with the Labe River. The Czech Republic has a beautiful and diverse landscape with plenty of mountains, gentle highlands, lowlands, caves, canyons, broad fields, bogs, lakes, ponds and dams. Unfortunately, the further north you go, the worse the appalling air pollution and high-altitude acid-rain damage gets, the belated pay-back for unregulated industrialisation since the 19th century.
Despite centuries of clear-cutting for cultivation, forests still cover about one-third of the Czech Republic. Most remaining virgin forest is in uncultivatable mountain areas. Above the tree line (about 1400m) there is little but grasses, shrubs and lichens.
| The richest wildlife are bears, wolves, lynxes and other wildcats, marmots, otters, marten and mink. Pheasants, partridges, ducks, wild geese and other game birds are common in woods and marshes, and commonly hunted. Eagles, vultures, osprey, storks, bustards and grouse are rarer.
The damp continental climate over most of the Czech Republic is responsible for warm, showery summers; cold, snowy winters; and generally changeable conditions. July is the hottest month everywhere, January the coldest. From December through February, temperatures push below freezing even in the lowlands, and are bitter in the mountains. There is no real 'dry season', and the long, sunny hot spells of summer tend to be broken by sudden, heavy thunderstorms. Winter brings 40 to 100 days of snow on the ground (about 130 in the mountains), plus fog in the lowlands. |
