Bialowieza Forest and the last wild bison

Europe’s last primeval forest, and a species genuinely brought back

This is what the European Plain looked like before people. Bialowieza is the last large primary temperate forest in lowland Europe, a remnant of the immense woodland that once ran across the continent, and the World Heritage documentation credits its survival to several ages of protection. Some of that protection was royal appetite: the village at its heart takes its name from a white wooden hunting manor built there by Wladyslaw II Jagiello, Grand Duke of Lithuania and later King of Poland, who liked to hunt in the forest when it belonged to the Grand Duchy.

More than 800 European bison live here, Europe's heaviest land animal, and the phrasing in the World Heritage documentation matters: they are reintroduced. The species was driven out of the wild entirely and put back. Wolf, elk, lynx and otter are here too.

The forest straddles a national border, which has shaped how it is protected and how you visit. It lies in Podlachia on the Polish side and the Brest and Grodno oblasts on the Belarusian side, 62 kilometres southeast of Bialystok and 70 kilometres north of Brest, and because the frontier runs straight through it there is a crossing for walkers and cyclists. The World Heritage site covers 141,885 hectares.

Its listing history reads like the politics of the place. The Polish side went on the list in 1979, the Belarusian side separately in 1992, both under the criterion for exceptional natural beauty. Only in 2014 were they joined into a single transboundary site, and that extension was inscribed under two different criteria, the ones for ongoing ecological processes and for biodiversity conservation. In other words the forest was first recognised for how it looks and later for what it does. UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere programme designated the Polish reserve in 1976 and the Belarusian one in 1993.

The name comes from the village at its centre, and means White Tower in Polish.