Valley of Fairy Tales (Zlatoust)

The Valley of Fairy Tales, also known as the Sandy Hills, is a unique area of Taganay National Park in the Zlatoust Urban Okrug of Chelyabinsk Oblast, lying between the Otklikny Ridge and Kruglitsa on the Bolshoi Taganay ridge. The place is striking for its beauty and the variety of its natural rock formations.

A distinctive feature of the Valley of Fairy Tales is its sub-alpine dwarf spruce forest, clearings with berries (lingonberry, bilberry and crowberry), mountain grasses, and creeping juniper. Here you can find numerous bizarre rock outcrops made of sugar-like quartzite.

The site of the Valley of Fairy Tales lies in a zone of past intense tectonic movement. Quartz grains, weakly bound by a cementing substance, became slightly rounded through friction against one another and physical weathering. The result is striking shapes in the exposed rock.

Physical weathering has also released material that settled along the slopes of the saddle as snow-white quartz sand. Today this sand is concentrated on the narrow paths worn by visitors.

Thanks to the whimsical shapes of the rock formations, some of which resemble fairy-tale characters, this place came to be called the Valley of Fairy Tales. Tourists come here to enjoy the remarkable scenery and feel the atmosphere of the fairy-tale world created by nature.