Tara

Tara is a limestone table tipped into the elbow of the Drina. The river, arriving from Bosnia, wraps the mountain on two sides in a canyon that plunges the better part of a kilometre below the rim, and the park — declared in 1981, redrawn in 2015 to 24,992 hectares — occupies the plateau above it: Tara proper and the wilder Zvezda massif in the tightest part of the bend, with the Zaovine lake country added on the southern side. Around four-fifths of it is forest, and not ordinary forest — the mixed stands of fir, spruce and beech here are routinely cited among the most productive and best-preserved conifer forests in Europe, growing on sinkhole-pitted karst that has kept ploughs and roads away.

The tree that made the mountain famous is a survivor from before the ice. In 1875 Josif Pančić, the founding figure of Serbian botany, found an unfamiliar spruce at Zaovine — slender as a churchspire, its short needles glossy above and silvered below — and named it Picea omorika. The Serbian spruce turned out to be a Tertiary relict that the glaciations had erased from the rest of Europe, surviving only on these inaccessible limestone cliffs of the middle Drina, on both banks. It still grows almost nowhere else on Earth, mostly on ledges no botanist reaches without ropes. The fauna kept pace with the flora: Tara carries the densest brown-bear population in Serbia, along with chamois on the canyon walls, and the park runs feeding stations and hides that make this one of the more reliable places in the Balkans to see a bear.

Beneath the rim, history collected at the river. Rača monastery, founded by King Dragutin in the late thirteenth century at the mountain's foot, became in the seventeenth century the seat of a school of manuscript copyists — the Račani — who kept Serbian letters alive under Ottoman rule; the Gospel books written here are foundational documents of the literature. On the water below, Perućac reservoir fills the canyon mouth, and beside its dam rises the Vrelo, a karst spring-river 365 metres from source to Drina — locals call it the Year, one metre for each day — which may be the shortest river in Europe depending on who is measuring.

What's worth knowing before you go

Bajina Bašta, under the eastern rim, is the gateway; the road up switchbacks to the plateau centres of Kaluđerske Bare and Mitrovac, both with lodging and marked trails. The essential walk is to Banjska stena, the rim viewpoint where the whole system assembles at once — the lake vertically below, the Drina curving out of Bosnia, Zvezda's cliffs opposite. Boat trips run up the canyon from Perućac, and the Vrelo is a ten-minute stroll from the same village.

The plateau is genuinely all-season — summer for walking, autumn for the beech colour, winter quiet with modest skiing at Mitrovac — but bear-hide visits book through the park administration and are best arranged ahead. The connoisseur's detail is across the municipal line at Mokra Gora, half an hour south: the Šargan Eight, a narrow-gauge railway that climbs three hundred metres by tying a figure-eight inside the mountain, runs heritage trains that pair naturally with a Tara day — though note the line, like Drvengrad above it, sits outside the park boundary.