Sutjeska

Sutjeska is the country's oldest national park and still its wildest corner: declared in 1962 around the gorge the Sutjeska river cuts between the Zelengora massif and the wall of Maglić and Volujak on the Montenegrin border. Maglić, at 2,386 metres the highest point of Bosnia and Herzegovina, anchors the southeastern rim; below it the terrain drops through spruce and beech to the green slot of the river, a vertical kilometre and a half of relief packed into a park of sixteen thousand hectares. This is Dinaric high country at full strength — limestone crests, glacial cirques, and forests that have never heard a saw.

The forest is the point. Perućica, tucked into the amphitheatre between Maglić and the gorge, is routinely called one of the last primeval forests in Europe: 1,434 hectares under strict protection since 1954, where beech and fir stand sixty metres tall over an understorey that has been left to its own logic since the ice retreated. Through the middle of it the Perućica stream steps off a rock lip as the Skakavac waterfall, a 75-metre plume you view from the Dragoš sedlo overlook rather than approach — entry into the reserve itself is allowed only with a park guide, which is exactly as it should be.

The other thing the valley holds is the war. In May and June 1943 the Axis Fifth Offensive — Operation Schwarz — closed a ring of over a hundred thousand men around the Partisan main force here, and the breakout across the Sutjeska cost around seven and a half thousand Partisan lives, Sava Kovačević's among them, with Tito himself wounded near Tjentište. The memorial complex in the valley — Miodrag Živković's pair of jagged concrete wings from 1971, with the Memorial House and its murals below — is one of the great works of Yugoslav monument-building, and the reason the road through the park is a pilgrimage route as much as a scenic drive.

West of the gorge rises Zelengora, the "green mountain," a gentler massif strewn with glacial lakes the locals call gorske oči — mountain eyes. Orlovačko, Kotlaničko and the twin Bare lakes sit in grassy cirques that make for the best multi-day walking in the country, with chamois on the crags and one of the healthiest brown-bear populations in the Dinarides in the woods between.

What's worth knowing before you go

Tjentište, on the Foča–Gacko road, is the hub — park office, hotel, campsites and the memorial all sit in the same valley, and Foča, half an hour north, is the nearest town and the country's rafting capital for the Tara and Drina canyons. Perućica requires a guide booked through the park office; the Skakavac viewpoint at Dragoš sedlo is reachable by park road. The Maglić ascent starts from Prijevor, a high trailhead above Perućica, and is a serious full day with some cable-protected scrambling near the summit.

Summer is the season — the high routes hold snow well into June — and early autumn colours Perućica extravagantly. The connoisseur's move from Prijevor is not Maglić at all but the walk around the mountain's shoulder to Trnovačko jezero, the heart-shaped lake that technically lies a few hundred metres over the Montenegrin line: no border post, just a summit-ringed basin that repays the two hours each way.