Carpathian Mountains

The Carpathian Mountains form a roughly 1,500 kilometer long arc across Central and Southeast Europe, crossing the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Romania and Serbia and covering about 190,000 square kilometers, making them the third longest range in Europe after the Urals and the Scandinavian Mountains. Their highest peaks rise in the Tatra Mountains, where Gerlachovsky stit in Slovakia reaches 2,656 meters, closely followed by peaks over 2,550 meters in Romania's Southern Carpathians. The range formed during the Alpine orogeny of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras, the same mountain building episode that raised the Alps. The Carpathians hold the largest surviving European populations of brown bears, wolves, chamois and lynx, and more than a third of all European plant species grow within them.