Kronoberg County

Åsnen National Park and nature reserves in Kronoberg County

Kronoberg County has 154 nature reserves and one national park. Lakes, forests, mires and stone-rich farmland form a water-connected landscape carrying clear traces of long human use.

Forest and water interwoven

Kronoberg occupies a lake-rich part of the southern Swedish highlands. The ice sheet left moraine, eskers, boulders and countless hollows that filled with water. Rivers connect the lakes to several drainage systems, while beech, oak and other broadleaved trees play a larger role than farther north. Hornbeam reaches the northern edge of its Swedish range here.

This is not one continuous conifer forest. Pasture, hay meadow, deciduous woodland and veteran field trees remain around lakes and old farms. Mires and swamp forest fill wetter ground. Soil and water created the framework, but centuries of mowing, grazing, forestry and lake lowering have continually altered the pattern.

Åsnen’s islands and ancient beeches

About 75 per cent of Åsnen National Park is water. Hundreds of islands and small skerries lie among conifer stands, open shore fen, mire and old deciduous forest. At Bjurkärr, ancient beech woodland has an almost primeval structure. Veteran trees and decaying wood maintain continuity for lichens, fungi and wood-living insects.

Human traces remain even on the outer islands. Bergön once supported a farm whose last family left when compulsory schooling arrived in the nineteenth century. Its former infields have largely returned to deciduous woodland, but the setting recalls a time when the lake served as home, route and working landscape. The park therefore protects nature continuing to develop around older land use, not an empty wilderness.

Working ground restored to wetland

Husebymaden was drained for cultivation in the 1870s, with an Archimedes screw holding back the water. Farming ended in the 1930s and scrub took over. Restoration has since recreated open wetland where ducks, waders, geese and terns breed. It is a clear example of conservation restoring an ecological process that an earlier generation had interrupted.

At Korrö, the Ronnebyån divides around an island of hay meadow and veteran deciduous trees, beside a craft village whose current powered medieval mills. Taxås rises through broadleaved woodland beside Lake Möckeln, its cliff standing thirty metres above the water while hollow trees support birds and uncommon beetles. Åsnen, Husebymaden, Korrö and Taxås show water and long management acting together across the county.

National park in the county