Biogradska gora

Biogradska gora owes its forest to a thank-you gift. In 1878, when the Congress of Berlin confirmed Montenegro's independence, the tribes of the upper Tara presented the wooded basin above Biogradsko jezero to Knjaz Nikola, and the prince responded by placing it under his personal ban — the Knjažev zabran, a royal reserve in which the axe was forbidden. That decision, six years after Yellowstone, makes this one of the oldest protected areas in Europe, and it is why the heart of the park is genuine prašuma — primeval forest, around 1,600 hectares that have never been logged, where beeches and firs stand forty-five metres tall and the oldest trees have been dated past five hundred years. The park, one of Montenegro's founding trio of 1952, wraps that core in the summit country of the Bjelasica massif; the 2014 law re-described its boundary across the Kolašin, Mojkovac and Berane municipalities.

The forest works the way old forests do and managed ones don't. Nothing is tidied: windthrown giants rot where they fall and feed the next cohort, and the canopy layers itself from riverside alder and ash up through beech, fir and spruce to the mountain maple at the treeline. The species count is out of proportion to the park's size — some two thousand plant species and subspecies have been recorded on Bjelasica, with a strong Balkan endemic element — and the deadwood keeps an invertebrate and fungus fauna that vanished from most of the continent with the first forestry manuals. Bears pass through; so do the shepherds' dogs from the katuns above, which is worth knowing on the ridge paths.

Above the trees the massif opens into exactly the country the forest hides: rounded grassy summits — Crna glava the highest at 2,139 metres — and a scatter of glacial lakes, Pešića and Ursulovačko and Šiško, strung under the ridgeline. The katuns here, Vranjak among them, still fill with stock each June, and the contrast is the park's real lesson: the same mountain, one slope kept by a hunting ban and the other grazed for centuries, both counted as heritage now.

What's worth knowing before you go

Kolašin, fifteen kilometres south on the Podgorica–Belgrade road and railway, is the gateway town; the park entrance is at Kraljevo Kolo on the Tara valley road, from which a narrow asphalt lane climbs to Biogradsko jezero. The lakeshore has the visitor centre, a modest restaurant, rowing boats and a flat circuit path of about three and a half kilometres — the primeval forest begins immediately behind it, and even an hour on the lake loop passes trees worth the trip alone.

Summer and early autumn are the season; the lake road is not kept open in winter, when Kolašin's ski resorts take over. The honest advice is that the famous forest is best in poor weather — mist suits it better than sun — and the connoisseur's route is the full-day traverse up to Crna glava and the ridge lakes, dropping to a katun for cheese on the way down. Book a bed in Kolašin rather than counting on the lakeside bungalows, which are few and go early.