Malá Fatra

The Váh cuts the Malá Fatra in half at Strečno, sawing a gorge through the range in a double bend — the Domašínsky meander — with a thirteenth-century castle on the cliff above it. The national park, declared in 1988 on top of a landscape-protection area dating from 1967, takes the northern half: the Krivánska Malá Fatra, 22,630 hectares of it, culminating in Veľký Kriváň at 1,709 metres. The range is small in area and abrupt in everything else; from the Váh at 360 metres the crest rises well over a kilometre in a few horizontal kilometres, which gives these modest summits the carriage of much bigger mountains.

The park's signature is Veľký Rozsutec, 1,610 metres of bare dolomite serrated like a crown, probably the most photographed mountain silhouette in Slovakia and the emblem on the park's own logo. The limestone and dolomite nappes stacked over the granite core have weathered into crags, towers and slot canyons: the Diery — the "holes," a linked system of gorges between Rozsutec and Boboty — are threaded on ladders, chains and footbridges over a stream that falls in dozens of small cascades, and at Šútovo the range drops its largest single waterfall, thirty-eight metres. Above the rock, the crest carries grassy saddles grazed for centuries; below it, beech and fir forests that bears, wolves and lynx have fully reoccupied, with golden eagles back on the crags.

Terchová, the village at the park's gate, was the birthplace of Juraj Jánošík in 1688 — the highwayman hanged at Liptovský Mikuláš in 1713 who became the Slovak Robin Hood, subject of films, an aluminium statue on the hill above the village, and a folklore festival that fills late July. The pairing is not incidental: these tight valleys bred both the sheep-herding culture the park's meadows still record and the outlaw legend that needed exactly this kind of country to hide in.

What's worth knowing before you go

Žilina is the gateway city, with buses up the valley to Terchová and on into Vrátna dolina, where a cable car rises to Snilovské sedlo just under Veľký Kriváň. The essential day is the Rozsutec circuit from Štefanová through the Diery gorges and over the saddle at Medziholie — do it clockwise so the ladders come uphill, and expect the gorges to be closed or icy in winter, when the crest between Chleb and Kriváň is avalanche-prone. The Jánošíkove dni festival turns Terchová over to folklore in the last week of July. The connoisseur's detour is at the range's cut end: the castle at Strečno above the Váh gorge, and below it the replica plte — the timber rafts that ran the river until the dams came — which in summer still float the Domašín bend with a raftsman narrating.