Paklenica
Two gorges cut straight down the seaward face of the Velebit — Croatia's big-wall climbing ground, with an unfinished Yugoslav command bunker in the canyon floor.
Paklenica works on a single dramatic gradient. The Velebit, the long limestone wall that separates the Adriatic from inland Lika, reaches its highest ground here — Vaganski vrh at 1,757 metres — and the sea is barely ten kilometres away. Two torrents, Velika and Mala Paklenica, cut straight down that face in parallel gorges, and the park protects them and the ridge above: ninety-five square kilometres running from the coastal scrub at Starigrad through beech and black pine to bare karst plateau. Croatia protected it in October 1949, six months after Plitvice, which makes the two of them the country's founding pair.
Velika Paklenica is the one everyone walks. It opens as a broad stony riverbed and narrows within a couple of kilometres to a slot where the walls close to a few dozen metres apart and rise several hundred — and on the left, at the mouth, stands Anića kuk, a single sweep of limestone about 350 metres high and the largest climbable face in the country. Croatian climbing effectively grew up on it; there are several hundred routes in the gorge now, the classics on Anića kuk itself, and the park is busy with ropes from March onward. Higher up the valley the path breaks out onto the plateau at Struge and the summit ridge, where the perspective inverts and you look down the whole drop to the Adriatic with the islands of the Kvarner laid out beyond.
Two pieces of twentieth-century strangeness sit in the canyon. A few hundred metres inside the entrance, a set of steel doors opens into a tunnel complex driven into the rock between 1950 and 1953 — a command bunker and shelter for the Yugoslav leadership, begun in the panic of the Tito–Stalin split and never finished, kept secret until 1991 and open to visitors only since 2016. And in the 1960s the gorges played the American West: four of the Karl May Winnetou films, the Yugoslav-German westerns that were enormously popular across Europe, were shot in Velika Paklenica between 1962 and 1968, which is why German visitors of a certain generation arrive already knowing the scenery. Two of the park's old-growth beech stands — Suva draga-Klimenta and Oglavinovac-Javornik, some two thousand hectares between them — were added to the UNESCO transnational beech-forest inscription in July 2017.
What's worth knowing before you go
Starigrad-Paklenica on the coastal road is the gateway, half an hour north of Zadar, and the park entrance is a short walk up from it. Spring and autumn are the seasons — the gorge is a heat trap in July and August, and the climbing crowd concentrates in April, May, September and October. The bura, the downslope wind off the Velebit, is fierce in winter and can shut the coast road below the mountain entirely. Manita peć, the show cave halfway up the gorge, opens only on set days, so check before counting on it.
The connoisseur's route is Mala Paklenica, the other gorge, three kilometres south. It has no ticket office, no cafés and no climbers — just a rougher path up a narrower canyon through the abandoned hamlets whose terraces are still visible in the scrub, and on a weekday you will probably have it entirely to yourself.