Drina

Drina is the youngest of the country's four national parks and the mirror image of an older one: declared in 2017 along twenty kilometres of the river's left bank in Srebrenica municipality, it is the Bosnian wall of the same canyon whose Serbian rim is Tara National Park. The two parks stare at each other across the water. Between them the Drina has cut one of Europe's deepest river gorges — the walls reach 976 metres above the river — though the river at the bottom is no longer quite a river: the Perućac dam, downstream since 1966, has pooled it into a long jade-green lake that fills the canyon floor like a fjord.

The park exists above all for a tree. Pančić's spruce, Picea omorika — the slender Tertiary relict Josif Pančić described from the Serbian bank in 1875 — survives nowhere on Earth but the middle Drina basin, and the Bosnian cliffs here carry some of its best remaining stands, spired trees rooted in limestone crevices no fire or axe has ever reached. The same rock keeps a dense concentration of endemics: the park's botanists count over six hundred plant species in its modest 6,315 hectares, with the canyon's crevice flora — bellflowers, saxifrages, the Balkan endemic ramondas — the scientific heart of the designation. Chamois work the ledges, and bear, lynx and wolf move along the wooded plateau behind the rim.

It is also a landscape of thresholds. The river has been the border between Bosnia and Serbia for centuries — of empires before that — and the canyon section was always the hardest crossing on it; the ruined medieval fort above Klotjevac village watched the passage long before any state drew the line on a map. The drowned valley has its own melancholy beauty: boats from Perućac run up the lake between walls that close to a few hundred metres, past waterfalls that thread down from the omorika ledges, and the silence in the inner canyon is total.

What's worth knowing before you go

Srebrenica is the park's seat and gateway, with the road in running south along the river through Skelani, where a border crossing connects to Bajina Bašta on the Serbian side. The canyon itself is best seen from the water — boat excursions run up the Perućac lake in season, arranged from either bank — while the Bosnian rim viewpoints are reached by rough park roads and are worth the effort for the omorika cliffs alone. Summer and early autumn are the seasons; the canyon roads are not winter roads.

Srebrenica's name carries the weight of the 1995 genocide, and the memorial at Potočari, just north of town, belongs to any honest visit to the region. The connoisseur's move is to treat the canyon as one landscape and pair this park with Tara across the water — the Skelani–Bajina Bašta crossing makes it a single trip, and seeing Pančić's spruce from both rims is the closest anyone gets to the botanist's own 1875 view.