Slovenský raj

The Slovak Paradise is a karst plateau that broke. Streams draining north to the Hornád have cut the limestone table into a maze of slot gorges — Suchá Belá, Piecky, Veľký Sokol, Kyseľ — each a staircase of waterfalls in a corridor sometimes only a few metres wide, and the only way through them is straight up the water on the ladders, chains, stemples and footbridges the tourist clubs began bolting in place over a century ago. The territory was the first in Slovakia to be declared a protected landscape area, in 1964, was promoted to national park in January 1988, and the 2016 re-declaration settled it at 19,763 hectares of gorge, plateau pine and beech.

The technical rules are part of the landscape. Gorge routes are one-way, uphill only — meeting a party coming down a fixed ladder above a waterfall is not an experience anyone repeats — and the Prielom Hornádu, the river's own sixteen-kilometre canyon across the park's northern edge, is walked on a path pinned to the rock wall on chains and iron steps. Kyseľ, the wildest of the gorges, burned in 1976 and stayed closed for forty years; it reopened in 2016 as a via ferrata, the first legal one in a Slovak national park, which is the local way of admitting a place is too good to keep locked.

The plateau above the gorges kept the region's memory. Kláštorisko, a grassy clearing at its heart, holds the ruin of a Carthusian monastery founded around 1300 on the Skala útočišťa — the Rock of Refuge, where the people of Spiš had survived the Mongol invasion of 1241 behind the cliffs; the monks' successors are the volunteer archaeologists who have spent decades raising the walls again, and a summer buffet serves hikers where the silent order once kept its cells. On the park's southern rim, the Dobšinská Ice Cave — part of the Slovak Karst caves' World Heritage listing — holds over a hundred thousand cubic metres of floor ice; it was opened to the public in 1870 and electrically lit by 1887, among the first caves in Europe to manage it, and the ice survives at an altitude where no glacier could.

What's worth knowing before you go

Podlesok, by Hrabušice, is the main northern trailhead (Suchá Belá starts directly from the campsite) with Čingov, nearer Spišská Nová Ves, the other; Dedinky and its reservoir serve the quieter south. Go early — Suchá Belá on a summer weekend queues at every ladder — or pick Piecky and Veľký Sokol, which carry a fraction of the traffic for equal reward. Light gloves are the local wisdom for the chains; the gorges close when iced, though Suchá Belá in full winter armour is a guided classic. The ice cave runs mid-May to September. The connoisseur's spot costs no ladders at all: Tomášovský výhľad, a cliff terrace hanging over the Hornád's canyon a flat hour from Čingov, at its best toward evening — and Spišský hrad, one of Europe's largest castle ruins, is half an hour east if the weather turns.