There are three things one cannot miss when walking around Split: advertisements for boat tours to the Blue Cave, billboards for day trips to Krka National Park, and photos of the turquoise waters of Plitvice Lakes Naitonal Park. Plitvice is located a lot closer to Croatia’s capital of Zagreb than it is to Split, so from our base in Zagreb we rented a car for the day and journeyed south to see what all the hubbub was about.
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It was a mission of a day: the morning walk to get the rental car in Zagreb, two hours of driving each way, and roughly 10 miles/16 kilometers of walking to explore Plitvice Lakes National Park itself. And the cost of entry to the park deserves a mention, given I thought the lady at the entrance station had added an extra zero when she told us how many kuna it was for our family of four. With the entrance fee and parking it was ore than US$100 to see the lakes and cascades of Plitvice. I thought it was expensive to enter a national park in the US!
Griping aside, the lakes and waterfalls of Plitvice were very unique. None of us had ever seen freshwater that was such a brilliant turquoise color, and the water was so clear that in some spots it appeared there was no water at all. The only other place in the world I’d seen water so clear is the spring-fed creeks of Fraser Island off the Queensland Coast. Plitvice is quite large and has two entrances, located adjacent to the lower and upper lakes respectively. It’s possible to access all the lakes from a single entrance by taking a boat ferry – included in the price of an entrance ticket – across the central lake of the park. But we instead decided to break the day into two, walking around the lower lakes first with a lunch break back at the car before driving to the upper lakes entrance. The boardwalks built around the park made it straightforward to traverse the endless cascades and waterfalls between the lakes, but it was often a bit of a traffic jam trying to negotiate a path between the hundreds of tourists walking at different paces on different sides of the six foot wide paths. The boardwalks often passed directly over bodies of water without any form of railing, Lisa and I wondered aloud a number of times how many people end up in the drink!
The lower lakes took us a couple of hours to explore and was a relatively easy stroll, Lilia actually pointed out one woman that tackled it in high heels! We took a slightly longer route around the upper lakes after taking a short boat ferry to the trailhead, climbing up through the surrounding forest onto the state park trail system bordering the national park. It was a beautiful hike through the shady trees, we all noted it would have been a killer ride on our mountain bikes, and Max and I were scoping out skiing routes down the steep glades that would be covered in snow each winter. There were some excellent viewpoints down to the upper lakes towards the end of our forested hike, especially of the large Veliki Prštavac waterfall.
The route back to the boat ferry was a maze of boardwalks around the upper lakes, waterfall after waterfall and an almost countless number of cascades over which the raised paths passed. The sound of the cascades with the amazing turquoise water made for quite a unique experience. The photos here really don’t do the lakes justice, it was very tough to get good shots as the sun was directly behind almost every single one of the cascades (and I left my polarizing filter back in Zagreb!). Very much a place where one would have to plan the time of day for good photos, and maybe even target the spring or autumn to get the appropriate aspect of the sun.
Decades ago one used to be able to swim in the lakes of Plitvice, but understandably – given the hundreds of thousands of tourists that visit the park each year – swimming is no longer allowed. We broke up the drive home with a quick stop in quaint Slunj for a dip in the chilly water of the crystal clear Korana River. Slunj was like a little fairytale village perched above the Korana, with a handful of waterfalls cascading from below the town’s structures. A nice spot to break up the drive, very refreshing (and exhilarating!) to have a swim before heading back to Zagreb.
It was a big day. I’m glad we made the trip down to Plitvice, but the national park really was more of a tourist trap than somewhere one goes to take in beautiful natural surrounds. The turquoise waters of the lakes was like nothing we’d ever seen and is something that will undoubtedly stick in our memories as a very unique experience, but I think this was probably the only adventure in Croatia on which I could have maybe taken a pass.
Looks pretty fantastic in your photos. I have heard of Plitvice, and if I ever make it too Croatia, it is on my list of things to see. Perhaps you arranged your photos cleverly, but the trails hardly look crowded. I wonder if this late in the year the waterfalls are at much less volume than during the spring melt. Are they glacier fed – is that why the water is turquoise?
It looks like a lot of lakes on that map, but it is hard to grasp the scale – is one day sufficient to thoroughly see the park?
Yeah, I tried not to take photos of the boardwalks packed with tourists, but they were certainly there… No glaciers around Plitvice, I believe the color comes from calcite suspended in the water, which in turn comes from all the limestone in Croatia. I think that’s why the Adriatic is so amazingly blue and turquoise as well: all the drainage from the limestone in the soil. Yes, one day is definitely sufficient to see the park but you would want a full day to see the whole thing. There are a ton of hiking trails in the state park surrounding the national park which you could explore too, but if you just want the lakes and falls of Plitvice one day is good.