Plitvice


Today we visited Croatia’s Plitvice Lakes National Park. This is not our picture - we were not able to capture the beauty of these lakes during our eight-mike hike. 


We stayed in the Ethno Houses ehich was our home for one night.


Plitvice, (PLEET-veet-seh) located in Croatia's interior, is very close to the Bosnian border, and is the location of Plitvice Lakes National Park. The park boasts 16 terraced lakes and 90 waterfalls, all connected with hiking trails and plank walks. There are silent, pollution-free electric boats that take hikers across the park's largest lake and shuttle buses that run between the park’s entrances. The lakes have trout and the woods are home to 50 endangered European brown bears, deer, wolves, wildcats, lynx, wild boar, voles, otters and more than 160 species of birds. 

On Easter Sunday in 1991, the first shots of Croatia's war with Yugoslavia were fired in this park. The Serbs occupied Plitvice and the surrounding region until 1995 and many Croatians from the area were evacuated and lived near the coastline as refugees.

Today, this park shows no signs of the war and roughly 10,000 hikers (mostly Croatians and other Europeans) visit it daily. 


A word of caution. The boardwalks are roughly 3 1/2 feet wide, made from raw lumber that were not planed, have no railings and tourists either passing or coming the opposite direction. Definitely not a place for young children.  However dangerous - they did allow for beautiful views of the incredible scenery.



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