Ostrava’s Wandering Boulder

The largest wandering boulder in the Czech Republic is displayed in front of one of the gates of the LIBERTY Ostrava metallurgical plant. The stone, which weighs almost eighteen tonnes, was pushed here by a glacier during the Ice Age, roughly two million years ago.

It arrived from Sweden or Finland and was discovered in Ostrava by workers in 1954 when they were digging the foundations for the construction of the foundry of the metallurgical plant. The boulder lay at a depth of less than seven metres.

The Kunčice Wandering Boulder has been declared a natural monument and is cleaned every five years to reveal its yellowish grey-pink colour. The largest wandering boulder is one of many that have been pushed from northern Europe by glaciers into Moravia and Silesia. A number of these boulders can be visited, for example, in the Bruntál region or around Osoblaha.

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