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The national park Valday was formed in 1990 both to protect unique lake and forest area of Valday highland and to develop geo and ecotourism. Since 1994 the park has been a member of Federation of Nature and National Parks of Europe, in 2004 it became UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. The national park Valday is situated half a way between Moscow and Saint-Petersburg and many people visit it every year.
The park is famous both for it nature and cultural and historical monuments. It is located within the terminal moraine of the latest European glaciation, called Valday (Wrm), which has got its height marks from limestone Carbon Plateau lying directly under valday glacial sediments. This is the main divide of the East European plane between basins of the Black, Caspian, and the Baltic Sea. Passing through an escarpment of the plateau the rivers of the Baltic basin get "mountain character" and it is a favorite place of water tourists as the only possibility for people from Saint-Petersburg and Moscow to make a real mountain water trip for a few days. Unfortunately unorganized tourism is still the main form of tourism in the park.
Another problem of the park is concentration of both organized and unorganized tourists at a few wellknown sites, such as the rivers Polomet' and Msta, the lakes Seliger, Vel'e, Valday and some others. Popularization of other interesting sites of Valday park in frames of organized tourism could help mitigation of excessive recreation pressure with benefit for visitors.
Another social and cultural problem is migration of local population to the cities. To some extent the resulted deficiency is made up with townspeople who buy country houses and spend there their summer vacations. As a result rural settlements within the park either disappear or turn to summer villages. It is a pity because the majority of villages in the park are very old and they has formed their own cultural landscape around. Our research found a very developed system of local toponyms indicating content and limits for the cultural landscape of every village, which can disappear together with the residents.
A certain decision of the problem is making new workplaces and recruiting the residents into tourist business from one hand and designing GIS and datasets collecting nature historical and cultural information for the park from the other hand. Placing these data in the Internet is the way of the Valday National Park advertising for development of organized ecological tourism and gathering money for necessary scientific and environmental programs.
Our research is devoted to the cultural landscape conservation only for a small territory of several villages but we found that there cultural landscapes and even their placenames exist in oral tradition at least since the 17th century. Only developing cooperation between population (not necessary residents) and park administration can help to protect natural, cultural, and historical landscapes of Valday.
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