Dancing Forest
Interesting facts
- The pine shoot moth blamed for the twisting, Rhyacionia buoliana, mainly attacks young pines between about five and twenty years old.
- The moth thrives on poor sandy soils with low groundwater and few nutrients, exactly the conditions found on the Curonian Spit.
- Pine was chosen to stabilise the dunes because it can take root on bare sand with very little nourishment.
- Besides wind and insects, viruses have also been proposed as a cause of the trunks' contortions.
- Unlike so-called drunken trees, which simply lean at odd angles, these pines are coiled into rings, hearts and spirals.
- Heavy visitor traffic has killed trees here: people climb the trunks, break branches and strip bark as souvenirs.
Why it is worth it
The Dancing Forest is a stand of pines on the Russian part of the Curonian Spit whose trunks twist, loop and coil as though the trees had frozen mid-movement. Some bend into rings, others spiral close to the ground before turning upwards, and a few have grown into shapes that visitors read as hearts. The site lies at kilometre 37 of the road along the spit, near the village of Rybachy, on a dune known as Kruglaya ("round") that stands apart from the main ridge of dunes along the lagoon shore.
The trees are not old. They were planted in 1961 to fix the loose sand of the dune, part of a long effort to stabilise the spit, and the contortions developed as they grew. Nobody has settled why this plot turned out so strange, while the same pines elsewhere grew straight. The most widely cited explanation is biological: caterpillars of the European pine shoot moth eat the leading buds of young pines, so that a side shoot takes over and the trunk kinks, and repeated damage produces the loops. Strong and shifting winds on the dune are also blamed, and less orthodox theories about the site's magnetic field circulate as well. Local folklore says the trees are simply following the movement of the sand. Before the Second World War the dune was the site of a German gliding school.
The setting matters as much as the trees. The Curonian Spit is a narrow sand barrier 99 km long and between half a kilometre and 4 km wide, dividing the Baltic Sea from the Curonian Lagoon; its northern half belongs to Lithuania and its southern half to Russia's Kaliningrad region, and the whole spit is a World Heritage Site shared by both countries. In earlier centuries the forests were cut, the dunes began to move and buried villages, and the replanting that stopped them created much of the woodland seen today. The Dancing Forest is part of the national park. Its popularity has a cost: visitors climbing on the trunks and stripping bark for souvenirs have killed trees, so stay on the path and leave them alone.
Getting there
The forest is about 35 km from Zelenogradsk, the resort town at the southern entrance to the spit, along the road that runs up the spit. Khrabrovo Airport (KGD), serving Kaliningrad, is about 36 km away in a straight line.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Dancing Forest is a pine forest on the Curonian Spit in Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia noted for its unusually twisted trees. Unlike drunken trees, the trees in the Dancing Forest are twisted into several patterns, such as rings, hearts and convoluted spirals bending to the ground. The exact cause of the trees' distortion is unknown. According to one hypothesis, the distortion is caused by the activity of caterpillars. In a folk story, the Dancing Forest follows the movement of the sands. Trees of such unusual shapes are found throughout the Curonian Spit.
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