Krka

The Krka runs about seventy kilometres from under the Dinaric wall at Knin to the sea at Šibenik, and for most of that distance it is doing something unusual: depositing the rock it is cutting through. The water comes out of the karst saturated with dissolved calcium carbonate, and where mosses and algae in the current strip carbon dioxide out of it, the carbonate precipitates onto them and sets. The plants keep growing, the deposit keeps thickening, and over centuries the process builds travertine dams across the riverbed. The park protects the resulting staircase — seven major barriers, of which Skradinski buk at the bottom is the largest in the country: a spread of seventeen cascades dropping some forty-five metres across a front two hundred metres wide.

Upstream the river alternates between deep canyon and standing water impounded behind its own dams. Immediately below Roški slap — a barrier some six hundred metres long that drops twenty-odd metres in a dozen steps, the upper ones a chain of small pools the locals call the necklaces — the river spreads into Visovačko jezero, and in the middle of that lake sits Visovac: a small island entirely occupied by a friary, held by Augustinian hermits from the fourteenth century and by Franciscans since 1445, white against the water, with a library holding an illuminated Aesop and a set of Ottoman-era documents. Further upstream, above Kistanje on the eastern bank, stands the Serbian Orthodox monastery of Krka, built over Roman catacombs. Manojlovac, higher still, is the tallest fall on the river at close to sixty metres, and runs properly only when the hydro plants above it let it.

Those plants are the other reason the Krka matters. On 28 August 1895 the Jaruga powerhouse at Skradinski buk began generating alternating current from the falls and transmitting it eleven kilometres to Šibenik, whose three hundred and forty street lamps made it one of the first cities anywhere lit by an AC public system — and it started up two days after the Adams plant at Niagara Falls, which is the comparison Šibenik has been making ever since. The park itself was declared in 1985 over a considerably larger area than it now holds; a 1997 law pulled the southern boundary back upstream from Skradin and trimmed the north toward Knin, cutting the park from roughly 142 square kilometres to 109 and leaving the towns, the motorway corridor and the tourism zones outside.

What's worth knowing before you go

Skradin and Lozovac are the two main entrances, and they behave differently: from Skradin the park's own boat takes you up the last stretch of river to the falls, from Lozovac a bus runs down the canyon side. Šibenik is the nearest city, on the coastal rail line and half an hour away. Swimming at Skradinski buk — for many years the park's signature image — has been prohibited since 2021, so come for the water rather than in it. April to June is the strong season: the falls are still fed by the winter, and the crowds have not arrived.

The connoisseur's detail is upstream. Most visitors see Skradinski buk and leave, but the boat excursion to Visovac and on to Roški slap covers the part of the river where the travertine process is actually visible at close range — and above Roški slap the path climbs to the Oziđana pećina cave, which holds Neolithic pottery and a view straight down the canyon.