Galičica

Galičica is the mountain between the lakes: a limestone ridge rising to Magaro's 2,254 metres with Lake Ohrid on its western shoulder and Lake Prespa on its eastern one, a national park since 1958 that runs shore to shore across the whole width of the massif. The two lakes are not level — Prespa sits about 150 metres higher — and the mountain's party trick is that it connects them underground: Prespa has no surface outlet, and its water sinks into Galičica's karst and re-emerges in the great springs at the foot of the Ohrid side, most famously in the spring pools beside the monastery of Sveti Naum. Dye-tracing confirmed what the monks' ponds always implied — walk over the ridge and you are walking over a river you cannot see.

The karst explains the botany. Galičica missed the worst of the ice ages' scouring and kept its southern exposure, and the result is one of the densest concentrations of plant life in the Balkans — well over a thousand species on this one ridge, with a shortlist of plants that grow nowhere else on earth, Galičica's own knapweed among them. The high plateau between the summits is old pasture, grazed thin for centuries and now slowly re-wilding, and in June it flowers extravagantly. The park road from Ohrid over the ridge to Prespa crosses it at about 1,600 metres; from the hairpins near the pass you can photograph both lakes in one frame.

In Prespa, a short boat ride off the Konjsko shore, the park keeps its strangest possession: Golem Grad, an uninhabited limestone table of an island — cliffs all round, foja junipers on top — that holds the ruins of a Byzantine monastic settlement, a colony of Dalmatian pelicans and cormorants, and a famously dense population of water snakes that earned it the nickname Snake Island. It is the only island in North Macedonia, and landing on it feels like stepping into a natural-history plate from another century.

The Ohrid flank of the park runs above the oldest continuously inhabited shoreline in Europe — the lake and the town of Ohrid are a joint UNESCO World Heritage property for nature and culture together — and the lakeshore villages under the boundary, Peštani and cliff-hung Trpejca, are the prettiest bases on the water. At the park's southern tip the springs, the monastery and the border with Albania all meet at Sveti Naum.

What's worth knowing before you go

Ohrid town is the gateway — buses and the airport are there, and the park begins a few kilometres south along the lake road. The over-the-ridge road to Prespa is the essential drive, open roughly May to October at the top; Magaro is a straightforward half-day walk from the pass. Boats to Golem Grad go from Stenje or Konjsko on the Prespa side and need calm weather — arrange it a day ahead, and go in May or June when the pelicans are about and before the snakes retreat from the heat. The connoisseur's hour is early morning at Sveti Naum, watching the spring pools boil sand before the day-trip boats arrive from Ohrid.