Pieniny

The Pieniny are a geological accident that made a landscape: a belt of hard Jurassic limestone klippen — the bradlové pásmo, the "klippen belt" that marks the suture where the inner and outer Carpathians meet — squeezed up into white crags through softer rock, and then sawn through by the Dunajec. The river's gorge, nine kilometres of tight meanders between walls rising three hundred metres, is the centrepiece of the smallest national park in Slovakia: Pieninský národný park, 3,750 hectares, declared in January 1967. The famous silhouette of Tri koruny — Three Crowns — stands on the Polish bank; the Slovak side answers with the Haligovské skaly, a crag-wall honeycombed with caves where prehistoric finds go back to the Neanderthals.

The park's history is longer than its statute, and it is a shared one. In 1932 Poland created its Pieniny national park and Czechoslovakia matched it with a nature reserve on this bank — together the first international protected area in Europe, a pairing conceived explicitly as one landscape under two flags. The 1967 declaration made the Slovak half a national park in name as well; the frontier still runs down the middle of the river, and the gorge is best understood as a single park that happens to contain a border.

At the gorge's mouth stands Červený Kláštor, the Red Monastery — Carthusian from the fourteenth century, later Camaldolese — whose most famous resident, the eighteenth-century friar Cyprián, was herbalist, surgeon and apothecary to the whole region; legend has him building wings and flying from the crags, which was fantasy, though his herbarium of nearly three hundred specimens survives as fact. From the monastery landing the plte run — flat timber rafts poled by raftsmen in embroidered waistcoats, a river trade that turned to tourism in the nineteenth century and never stopped. The float through the meanders, with the walls closing overhead and the raftsman's patter naming every crag, remains one of the gentlest great experiences in the Carpathians.

What's worth knowing before you go

Červený Kláštor village is the base, reached by bus from Spišská Stará Ves or Stará Ľubovňa; the monastery museum is worth the hour before the river. Rafts run from spring to autumn, and the water is at its most colourful in late September against the beech turning on the walls. If you would rather walk, the Pieninská cesta footpath and cycleway follows the Slovak bank the length of the gorge to Lesnica — flat, car-free and arguably better than the raft for photographing the meanders; a footbridge at the gorge's end crosses to Szczawnica on the Polish side, so a raft down and a walk back makes the perfect loop. The connoisseur's addition is the climb through the Haligovské skaly to Aksamitka cave country — an hour of ladders and cliff terraces that most raft-day visitors never see.