Europe has nearly 500 national parks, and The Guardian Travel wants readers to nominate the one that has stuck with them. Its latest weekly tip competition asks for around 100 words on a memorable experience in a European national park — with the UK excluded from consideration. The winner, picked by Tom Hall of Lonely Planet, gets a £200 voucher for a stay with Coolstays, which lists more than 3,000 properties worldwide. Strong entries may also be published in the Guardian's Travel section and on its website.
To spark ideas, the paper name-checks a few crowd-pleasers. In Finland's Hossa, you can snowshoe across frozen lakes and through wild taiga forest — proper Arctic silence, well off the beaten path. Estonia's Soomaa offers kayaking through flooded wetlands, a landscape so waterlogged that spring floods create a 'fifth season' where paddling is often the only way to get around. And in the Mercantour in southern France, close to the Italian border, wolf tracking is the draw; the park is one of the few places in western Europe where the animals have returned and can be followed with guides.
The practical details matter more than the inspiration. Entries need to be roughly 100 words, and photos are welcome — though the judging is based on the writing alone. There's one significant restriction: for legal reasons, only UK residents can enter. The deadline is tight, too — submissions close on Monday 16 November at 10am GMT, so anyone planning to enter should draft their tip now rather than later.
Even if the competition isn't open to you, it doubles as a handy reading list. The parks mentioned point to a broader truth about European outdoors travel: the best wildlife and wildest scenery often sit in countries travellers skim past. The Baltics and Nordic nations in particular pack a lot of protected wilderness into small, easy-to-travel territories, with far thinner crowds than the Alps in August.
Why it matters: a free £200 towards a cabin or cottage is a genuinely useful prize, and the word limit means entering takes twenty minutes, not a weekend. For anyone who has hiked, paddled or tracked their way through a park they love, it's a low-effort shot at seeing their recommendation in print — plus a nudge to plan the next trip.
