Durmitor and the Tara Canyon

Why the canyon disappears

A gorge of this depth is cut narrow and forested, and the road that serves it mostly runs along the rim through trees or down at river level between walls. Either way your eye has nothing to measure against — no single viewpoint where the top and the bottom are in frame together, which is what the brain needs to register scale. Visitors drive the length of it and come away with photographs of a pretty river valley, then wonder what the fuss was.

Two places solve it. The first is the Đurđevića Tara bridge, a slender concrete arch thrown across the gorge, where you stand on the deck with the river a very long way directly beneath you and the scale arrives all at once. The second is the water. Rafting the Tara through the narrows puts you at the bottom looking up, which is the opposite information and arguably the better half — walls closing overhead, the sky reduced to a strip. Doing one gives you a canyon. Doing both gives you its size.

The river runs high and cold with snowmelt in late spring and settles into something gentler through the summer, which is when the family-friendly sections run. It is a day rather than an add-on, and it is the reason to give the north its own nights rather than trying to reach it and return in one go from the coast.

Durmitor above the canyon

The canyon is the northern edge of Durmitor, a limestone massif of bare grey peaks, glacial lakes and high meadow that is a national park and a UNESCO listing. Žabljak sits in the middle of it as the obvious base — the highest town in the Balkans, unremarkable in itself, and useful precisely because everything starts from it.

The Black Lake is the easy classic: a forested loop on the flat around dark water directly beneath the peaks, walkable in an hour or two by anyone, and close enough to town to do on an arrival afternoon. Above it the terrain turns serious quickly. Bobotov Kuk, at over two and a half thousand metres, is the summit day and a proper mountain day — long, exposed in places, and weather-dependent in a range where the weather changes fast. Between those two extremes the massif is threaded with marked routes through the high meadows, which is where most of the good walking actually is.

In winter the whole thing flips. Žabljak becomes the country's ski town, the lakes freeze, and the roads in need respect. This is a genuine second season rather than an off-season, and it is the reason the north is not simply a summer annexe to a beach trip.

Biogradska Gora and the forest that was never cut

An hour east, Biogradska Gora protects something rarer than scenery: one of the last stands of primeval forest in Europe, never logged, growing around a glacial lake in a bowl of mountains. The distinction matters more than it sounds. A managed forest is even-aged and tidy; this one has trees of every age including very old ones, standing deadwood, fallen trunks left to rot where they fell, and the depth of undergrowth that comes from centuries of that cycle running uninterrupted.

It is small, easy and quiet — a lake loop and a handful of trails rather than an expedition — and it makes an obvious pairing with a day on the Tara, since the two sit on the same side of the country. Visitors who have only seen the coast tend to find it the most surprising thing in Montenegro.

Getting up here, and how long it really takes

The north is about three hours from the coast, and that figure deserves suspicion in both directions. It is short enough that people treat the region as a day trip and long enough that doing so leaves almost no time at the far end. The roads climb, wind and pass through canyon sections where overtaking is not an option, so the drive is slower than the distance suggests and considerably more interesting than the distance suggests — the run in along the Tara is a piece of the trip in its own right rather than transit.

Two nights in Žabljak is the number that changes the shape of a Montenegrin holiday: enough for a rafting day, a mountain day and the drive at each end without hurrying any of them. How the country's distances behave generally, and why they mislead, is covered in getting around.