Triglav

Triglav is the rare national park that is also a national creed: the three-headed mountain on the flag, and the standing expectation that every Slovene climbs it at least once. The park around it covers some 840 square kilometres of the Julian Alps — Triassic limestone carved into glacial troughs like Vrata and Krma, dry karst plateaus, and the Triglav Lakes Valley whose protection in 1924 as the "Alpine Conservation Park" began the whole enterprise. On the 2,864-metre summit stands Aljažev stolp, the tin turret a village priest erected in 1895 on a plot bought for one florin, precisely so the top of the mountain would be Slovene ground.

The park straddles a continental divide: the Sava rises on one side and runs toward the Black Sea, the Soča on the other toward the Adriatic, improbably emerald along its whole length through Trenta. Between the two lies most of what the small country has of the high Alps — Lake Bohinj under the southern walls, the alpine pastures whose herders' cheese culture still works the high planine in summer, and the Vršič road the Russian prisoners of the First World War built over the pass while the Isonzo front consumed the valleys below. War memory is part of the landscape here; the Walk of Peace threads the park's western edge.

For a park of its size it is unusually vertical in character: valley floors at 400 metres, summits over 2,800, and the classic two-day ascent — up from Krma or the Vrata valley to the Triglavski dom hut, then the cabled final ridge at dawn — is a genuine mountaineering undertaking, not a walk. Lower down, the park is generous to the unroped: the Soča gorges, the Pokljuka forests, the cirque of the Seven Lakes.

What's worth knowing before you go

Bled and Bohinj are the eastern gateways (Bled has the rail connection; Bohinjska Bistrica sits on the old Bohinj railway), Kranjska Gora the northern, and Bovec in the Soča valley the western — in July and August a bus crosses Vršič between them. The summit season is roughly July to late September; snowfields hold the high routes into early summer, and the Vršič pass closes entirely in winter. Book mountain huts ahead in August, when the Krma route becomes a procession.

The connoisseur's move is to come at the park from Trenta in early October: the larches turn, the Soča keeps its colour, and the crowds are back in Ljubljana.