Maribor

The vine grows against the front of a house on the Drava embankment in Lent, and it has been documented there for over four centuries — old enough to have survived the phylloxera epidemic that destroyed most of Europe's vineyards, which is a substantial part of why it matters. It is still pruned, still harvested, and the tiny annual yield is bottled in miniature and given as a civic gift rather than sold. Cuttings from it have been planted around the world. Next door, a small museum covers the vine and the region's wine culture, and the visit takes twenty minutes and is entirely worth it. The surrounding Lent quarter is the oldest part of Maribor and the most enjoyable: a riverfront of restaurants and bars, the water wide and slow, and the remains of the medieval defences — including a judgement tower and a water tower — still standing along it. In summer the embankment hosts a large festival that fills it for a fortnight. Up the slope, the main square, the plague column, the cathedral and the castle with the regional museum make a compact and unhurried circuit, and the city's food and wine culture is set out properly in the food guide rather than here.

Beneath the streets of the centre lies one of the largest classic wine cellars in Europe: kilometres of vaulted tunnels on several levels, dating in part from the mid-nineteenth century, holding a very large volume of wine from the surrounding Styrian hills including bottles going back well over a century. It is a working commercial cellar rather than a museum, which is what makes the visit interesting — the tunnels are cold, damp, unglamorous and full of barrels, and the tour ends where you would expect. For anyone who has visited a great deal of prettified heritage, an hour underground in a functioning cellar is a useful corrective. Above ground, the same industry shapes the city's calendar: harvest in early autumn is when Maribor is at its most characteristic, with events across the region and the surrounding roads busy with fruit. It is worth pairing the cellar with a drive into the hills rather than treating it as a standalone attraction, because the point of both is the same landscape.

A cable car runs from the southern edge of the city up onto the Pohorje, and it changes what Maribor is. The massif is not alpine — it is old, rounded, granite rather than limestone, and covered almost entirely in spruce and beech forest — and that gives it a completely different character from the Julian Alps at the other end of the country: no rock faces, no exposure, no drama, just an enormous quantity of quiet woodland. In winter it is a ski area with the unusual feature of running right down towards the city, and it hosts a women's World Cup slalom each season. In summer it is one of Slovenia's best areas for mountain biking, with a bike park served by the cable car and a network of forest trails, and for gentle walking: marked paths, a scattering of huts, small dark lakes and raised peat bogs that are protected as natural monuments. There are also toboggan runs and family attractions near the top station. The essential point is accessibility — a city bus and a cable car put you in deep forest inside forty minutes of the main square, which is a rare thing anywhere.

Maribor is where the country changes. West of it Slovenia is alpine; east and north of it the land flattens into rolling hills and then the Pannonian plain, and the whole region is given over to viticulture. Marked wine roads run through Styria towards the Austrian border and east towards Prekmurje, past roadside cellars, hilltop chapels, klopotec wind-rattles built to scare birds from the vines, and a great many small family producers who sell at the door. This is unhurried touring country rather than a set of attractions, and it is best done slowly with a designated driver and no fixed plan. Further east the thermal spa towns cluster, an old and serious tradition here, and the food shifts decisively — pumpkin-seed oil, paprika, layered pastry. Because the distances are longer and the region is genuinely different in character, the trip-planning guide argues that the far east deserves a night rather than being attempted as a day trip from the capital, and Maribor is the natural place to spend it.