Kraj Vysočina, Czech Republic — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Kraj Vysočina known for?

Kraj Vysočina belongs to the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, an extensive range of hills and low mountains stretching well past a hundred kilometres, and the region's name comes straight from that high ground. Jihlava is the capital. English maps label the same country Highlands, while the official title, Jihlavský kraj, points instead at the town.

Where is Kraj Vysočina?

Kraj Vysočina occupies a stretch of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, the long upland range that runs for more than a hundred and fifty kilometres. Nothing here is flat for long. Hills and low mountains follow one another across the whole region, and the ground rises and falls in a steady rhythm that shapes the roads, the field boundaries, and the placement of every village on it.

The range is extensive rather than dramatic, a long line of rounded high ground rather than a wall of peaks. Jihlava is the administrative anchor. The capital gives Kraj Vysočina its official name, Jihlavský kraj, and the region's business, transport, and services concentrate there in a way they do not anywhere else across the uplands.

Elsewhere, settlement is small and scattered, with villages held in the folds between hills and farmland worked on ground that never quite levels out. The boundary itself is modern. Drawn in 2000, the kraj is a recent administrative shape laid over an upland recognised as one country far longer than any of its borders have existed.

In English the same high ground is simply the Highlands, which is how the region appears to a visitor reading a foreign map.

What is Kraj Vysočina like?

Life here follows the high ground. Kraj Vysočina carries a name drawn from the uplands themselves, and the identity that comes with it belongs to the hills rather than to any single city, however much Jihlava anchors the administration. Two historic lands meet in the range's own name.

Bohemian-Moravian Highlands says as much in a single compound, and the region sits within that shared upland rather than wholly inside either the Bohemian or the Moravian tradition. The kraj as an administrative unit is young. Villages are small and far apart across the highlands, so the habits of the region lean towards the local, the practical, and the slow, in the way of upland country everywhere.

Jihlava is the exception. As the capital it concentrates public life, gives Kraj Vysočina its formal title of Jihlavský kraj, and draws people down from the surrounding hills for anything the villages cannot supply. Outsiders often know the area only by its English label.

Highlands is what the maps say, and it is an honest description of a region whose whole character rests on standing higher than the country around it.

What is the history of Kraj Vysočina?

The kraj is young; the uplands are not. Kraj Vysočina was created in 2000 as an administrative unit of the Czech Republic, one of the newer shapes on the map of a country whose historic lands are far older. Its formal name, Jihlavský kraj, points to Jihlava.

The Bohemian-Moravian Highlands carried a settled identity long before that boundary was drawn.

What is the climate of Kraj Vysočina?

Height governs the weather in Kraj Vysočina. The Bohemian-Moravian Highlands lift the whole region above the country around it, so winters arrive earlier, snow lies longer, and summer heat is blunted in a way the lowlands beyond the range never manage. The pattern is temperate all the same.

Four clear seasons work through the hills, with the cold end of each one sharpened by altitude rather than by any coast or continental extreme. Jihlava feels it as much as the villages.

How do you get to Kraj Vysočina?

Jihlava is the way in. The capital takes most of the arriving traffic, and from there smaller roads climb and drop with the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands towards villages that lie well off any main line. Journeys here are measured in gradients.

Crossing Kraj Vysočina takes longer than a map suggests, because the upland range that gives the region its name also denies it a single flat corridor from one side to the other.