Plužine

The Piva is a reservoir, created when the river was dammed and the valley behind it filled, and knowing that explains everything you see. The water sits unnaturally high against the rock walls, side valleys end abruptly in it, and the level moves through the year with season and generation, exposing or drowning a band of pale shoreline. The colour is the striking part — a hard turquoise that comes from mineral content and depth, and that changes with the light through the day. It is around forty kilometres long and rarely more than a few hundred metres wide.

The route along the eastern shore is the reason many people come, and it exists only because the engineers had no flat ground to work with. It runs through a long succession of short tunnels cut straight into the cliff, most of them unlit, single-lane and open on the lake side, so that the drive alternates between darkness and sudden full views of the water below. It is slow, entirely unnerving the first time and completely safe at sensible speed. Sound the horn on blind sections and expect to reverse for oncoming vehicles occasionally.

Above the reservoir the Piva canyon continues as a dry gorge, and by depth it stands behind only the Tara among European canyons — over a kilometre from rim to river in places. It is far less visited than its neighbour and there is no equivalent bridge to view it from, so it is experienced from the road, from the rim, or on the water below the dam where rafting operates. The comparison with the Tara is the useful one: the Tara is deeper and busier, the Piva narrower and empty.

When the valley was flooded, a sixteenth-century monastery that would have gone under was dismantled and rebuilt on higher ground above the new shoreline, frescoes and all — a piece of engineering as remarkable in its way as the dam that made it necessary. It stands above the lake today and is open to visitors on the usual terms of a working religious house. It is the one built thing in the municipality worth a deliberate stop.