Risnjak

Risnjak sits in Gorski kotar, the wet, wooded, thinly populated upland between Rijeka and the Slovenian border that Croatians call their Siberia and mean it fondly — five metres of snow in a bad winter, and the coldest recorded temperatures in the country. The park is small, some sixty-three square kilometres, and it protects the massif that gives it its name along with the headwaters on its northern side. Ris is the Croatian for lynx, and the animal is genuinely here, alongside bears and wolves — though the lynx is a returnee rather than a survivor. Croatia's native population was shot out, the last one in 1903, and the mountain got its animals back only after a 1973 reintroduction in Slovenian Kočevje: the first lynx was recorded at Risnjak in June 1974, having walked here on its own.

The mountain matters geologically because it is a junction. This is roughly where the Alpine system passes into the Dinaric one, and the park sits at the meeting of three climates as well — Mediterranean air coming up from the Kvarner a dozen kilometres south, continental air from the Pannonian side, and montane conditions on top. The consequence is compression: beech and fir forest of the classic Dinaric type on the slopes, then dwarf pine and subalpine meadow near the summit of Veliki Risnjak at 1,528 metres, and from that summit a view that takes in the Julian Alps, the Kvarner islands and the open Adriatic at once. The forests were logged for centuries for Venetian and Austrian shipbuilding, and the park declared in September 1953 — Croatia's second, four years after Plitvice — was in part an attempt to keep something of the old stands intact.

The northern addition is the finest single thing in the park. The Kupa — the river that eventually forms much of the Croatian–Slovenian border — does not start as a trickle but arrives at the surface all at once, in a pool at the bottom of a wooded amphitheatre at Razloge, still and an implausible green. The pool itself is over eighty metres deep, and divers working the flooded shaft below it have passed a hundred and fifty metres without finding a bottom. The spring and the upper valley around it were brought inside the park when its boundaries were roughly doubled in 1997; before that the protected area stopped short on the mountain.

What's worth knowing before you go

Crni Lug is the base — a village on the park's eastern edge that houses the park administration and its information centre, twenty minutes off the Rijeka–Zagreb motorway at Delnice. Rijeka is the nearest city and the transport hub. The walk up Risnjak from Crni Lug via the Schlosser trail and the mountain hut below the summit is a comfortable day; the hut serves food in season and the summit is a further half hour. Snow lies late, so the high ground is a June-to-October proposition, while the Kupa spring is worth a visit in any month.

The connoisseur's detour is the botanical trail on the way to the summit, named for Josip Schlosser, the nineteenth-century physician-botanist who wrote the first flora of Croatia, and then, on a separate day, the drive down the Kupa valley from Razloge — a narrow road along a border river with Slovenia on the far bank, almost no traffic, and trout in every pool.