A Capital You Can Cross in Twenty Minutes
Ljubljana has 295,000 people, no cars in the centre, and dragons on the bridges. Plus a day trip into a cave system that swallows an entire river.
The centre of Ljubljana has been closed to cars since 2007. Not restricted, not congestion-charged: closed. Delivery vehicles get a window in the early morning and then the streets belong to bicycles and pedestrians and a fleet of small electric carts that carry anyone who asks, for free, driven by people who are extremely happy to talk.
You notice it in your body before you notice it intellectually. There is no scanning for traffic, no raised voices, no engine noise under conversation. The river runs through the middle with willows over it and cafés on both banks, and the whole thing is about the size of a large university campus.
Plečnik built the city twice
Jože Plečnik was the architect who redesigned Ljubljana between the wars, and the extent of it is startling once you start seeing it: the river embankments, the market colonnade, the sluice gate at the bottom of the old town, the cemetery, several bridges, a library, dozens of benches, lamp-posts, balustrades. He treated a whole capital as one project.
His work is neither modernist nor classical but a stubborn personal version of both — heavy stone, exaggerated columns, pyramids and cones appearing where they have no business appearing. The Triple Bridge is his. So is the covered market, which runs along the river in a long curve and still sells vegetables rather than souvenirs, and which is the best building in the country.
A city of 295,000 has a coherent architectural vision executed by one person over thirty years. Most capitals of ten million do not.
Dragons
The city's symbol is a dragon and it is everywhere — four large ones on the Dragon Bridge with their tails up, and hundreds of small ones on drain covers, door handles, beer taps, the football crest. The origin story involves Jason and the Argonauts sailing up the Danube and the Ljubljanica, which is geographically impossible and has been enthusiastically maintained for centuries anyway.
I climbed to the castle — twenty minutes on foot up a wooded path, or €4 on the funicular — mainly for the view of the Kamnik Alps to the north, which on a clear evening stand up on the horizon like something painted in later.
The river that goes underground
An hour and a half south-west by bus, the limestone opens up. The Reka river arrives at the Škocjan Caves as a normal river, disappears into a hole in the ground, and continues for thirty-four kilometres of cave passage before resurfacing near the Adriatic as a different river with a different name.
The guided route takes you through a chamber 146 metres high, on a bridge over the underground gorge, in a temperature of 12°C that after a week of 31°C outside is a physical shock. It costs €26 and takes two hours and is one of the two or three most impressive things I have seen on this continent. The Postojna caves nearby are bigger, busier and have a train; Škocjan has the river, which is the point.
Book the first slot of the day. The bus from Ljubljana gets you there for it if you are prepared to be at the station at 07:15, which I recommend without qualification and did not do until my second attempt.
The one leg with no train
From here the railway map starts to fray. There is no useful train to Montenegro; the line down the Dalmatian coast was never built and the inland routes go the wrong way. So tomorrow is a bus — eleven hours, two borders, one ferry-adjacent stretch of coast road, €54.
I have been dreading this leg for four months. Everyone I have mentioned it to has told me it is the best day of the whole trip.