Stránská skála
Peak · 310.8 m · Czechia
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Stránská skála is a 310.8m hill and national nature monument hosting Central Europe's most important Mid-Pleistocene paleontological site, with remains from the Cromerian interglacial period.
The short climb up from Slatina earns one of the better views over Brno, but it is the rock itself that made this hill a national nature monument: a sliver of ancient seabed, an Upper Jurassic limestone reef, its cliff pocked with roughly thirty caves. One of them held 645 fossilised Ice Age bird bones, another a sabre-toothed cat's tooth. Below the cliff, stone tools and burnt bone from an early human hunting camp put people here roughly 600,000 years ago, among the oldest traces of settlement anywhere in Moravia. Quarrying for the limestone ran from the late 12th century to 1925; stone cut here built the Parnas fountain on Brno's Zelný trh in the city centre.
What you see
From the summit, Brno spreads out below: Špilberk Castle and the cathedral of St Peter and Paul, with the disused Hády limestone quarry cutting into the ridge to the north.
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