Travel deep dive
Mostar and Herzegovina: Beyond the Old Bridge
Stari Most, the sixteenth-century Old Bridge over the Neretva, is Bosnia and Herzegovina's signature image, and the old quarter around it is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Herzegovina, the stony, Mediterranean-influenced south of the country, keeps its other highlights within a drive of the bridge: a dervish house at the spring of the Buna, the hill town of Počitelj above the Neretva, the Kravice falls, the medieval tombstones of Radimlja and a cave listed for the life it shelters.
Updated 2026-09-19
Stari Most: a sixteenth-century arch, rebuilt from the river
The Old Bridge was completed in 1566 on the order of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, built by a pupil of the Ottoman master architect Sinan as a single stone arch across the Neretva. The bridge that stands today is a reconstruction: destroyed in 1993, it was rebuilt under UNESCO's auspices with stone recovered from the riverbed and Ottoman building methods, and reopened in 2004. A year later UNESCO inscribed the Old Bridge Area of the Old City of Mostar on the World Heritage List for the way pre-Ottoman, Ottoman, Mediterranean and western European building traditions meet in one small riverside quarter.
The bridge is also a stage. Young men from Mostar have leapt from its parapet into the Neretva for generations, and the custom carried over to the rebuilt arch, so the diving is as much a part of the old town as the bridge it starts from.
Blagaj and Počitelj: a river spring and a walled hill town
Blagaj, a short drive south-east of Mostar, grew up where the Buna river emerges from beneath a sheer cliff. Its tekke, a dervish house, stands at the water's edge beside the spring, and UNESCO carries the natural and architectural ensemble of Blagaj on Bosnia and Herzegovina's tentative list.
Počitelj stands on the left bank of the Neretva, beside the road that runs south from Mostar towards the coast: stone houses stacked up a hillside inside walls, with a fortress at the top. UNESCO's tentative-list entry describes it as one of the few urban ensembles in the country preserved intact from the medieval and Ottoman periods, and its steep lanes climb to a view back over the river. Blagaj and Počitelj both fit into a single unhurried day from Mostar, which is a good reason to sleep in Mostar and make the town the first stop on a route north along the Neretva.
Kravice, Radimlja and Vjetrenica: water, stone and a living cave
The Kravice waterfalls, a horseshoe of cascades on the Trebižat River about an hour from Mostar, pour into a broad pool where swimming is part of a summer visit.
Near Stolac, the graveyard at Radimlja belongs to the Stećci Medieval Tombstone Graveyards, a World Heritage listing inscribed in 2016 and shared with Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia. The stećci are limestone tombstones, set out in rows in graveyards used between the twelfth and the sixteenth century, and carved with motifs and inscriptions that combine imagery common across medieval Europe with traditions of their own.
Further south, near Ravno and close to the Adriatic, Vjetrenica Cave was added to the World Heritage List in 2024 for its underground biodiversity: its passages and lakes shelter a rich community of cave-adapted animals, dozens of them first described from Vjetrenica itself.