Muránska planina

Muránska planina is a limestone plateau lodged in the middle of the Slovenské rudohorie — the Slovak Ore Mountains, a region otherwise of rounded metamorphic hills — and rimmed nearly all the way round with white cliffs, as if a piece of the Karst had been airlifted into mining country. The national park, declared on 1 October 1997 (the same day as Poloniny, by consecutive government regulations), covers 20,318 hectares of plateau, cliff and gorge, most of it under forest and almost none of it under roads: this is among the least visited of Slovakia's parks, which is an argument for it, not against.

Its rarest inhabitant grows on the north-facing crags. Daphne arbuscula — lykovec muránsky — is a dwarf evergreen shrub with pink flowers that exists nowhere on earth but the cliffs of this plateau: a Tertiary relict that sat out the ice ages on these ledges and never left, the park's emblem and the reason botanists make pilgrimages to Cigánka rock in May. The plateau under it is drilled with more than five hundred caves and abysses — Bobačka the longest, none open as show caves — and cut by steep short valleys like Hrdzavá dolina, where the stream appears and disappears as karst streams do.

On Cigánka's crown, at over nine hundred metres, stand the ruins of Muráň castle, one of the highest-set castles in central Europe, taken in the seventeenth century — by negotiation conducted through its mistress Mária Séči, the "Venus of Muráň," whose marriage-and-siege story every Slovak schoolchild once knew. Below the castle spreads Veľká lúka, the great meadow, where the state forests have bred the Norik muránsky — a mountain draught horse — since 1950; the semi-wild herds grazing against the cliff line are the park's second emblem, and the working horses still skid timber in terrain machines cannot enter.

What's worth knowing before you go

Muráň village, on the bus route between Brezno and Revúca, is the gateway; the classic half-day climbs from it to the castle ruin and back, extendable across Veľká lúka to see the herds. Hrdzavá dolina makes the best full-day loop, and the plateau crossing to Predná Hora or the Zbojská saddle shows the karst's disappearing streams. Waymarking is good but services are thin — carry water, as plateau karst offers none. The connoisseur's approach is by rail: the Brezno–Tisovec line brushing the park's western foot is a rack railway in its steepest section, one of the last in Slovakia, and further east the Telgárt loop with the Chmarošský viadukt — the country's most photographed stretch of track — makes a fitting overture to a plateau that machines otherwise never conquered.