The tourism region of the Tatras encompasses today the northern half (except for a tiny tip lying in Poland) of what used to be Scepusium or Szepes County. It was a part of the Kingdom of Hungary from the creation of the county in the second half of the 12th century to 1918 when Austria-Hungary ceased to exist and Czechoslovakia was created. This northern borderland was never really inhabited by Hungarians, but up until the last world war there was a substantial population of Carpathian Germans in Spiš or "Zips", where they began to arrive in the mid-12th century.
Stará Lesná was mentioned for the first time in 1294. The village was founded by the Berzeviczys, a family whose forefather Rutkér of Mátray (Matrei), an ispán, arrived to Spiš County from Tyrol in the beginning of the 13th century. The village belonged to a German language island. The German population was expelled in 1945.