Plitvice Lakes National Park Croatia

Legendary

Explore the beauty of this parks stunning lakes and caves connected by waterfalls.

Photo by Solmaz Zohdi

The waterfalls at Plitvice are built by moss. That sounds backward, but it's how the whole park works.

Water here flows over limestone and picks up dissolved minerals. When it hits the moss and algae growing on rocks and fallen logs, the minerals settle out and harden into a stone called travertine.

The stone builds up on the plants, layer by layer. The plants keep growing on top, and the stone keeps forming, until a natural dam rises across the stream.

Those dams grow about 1 centimeter a year. Over thousands of years, they've stacked into a staircase of 16 lakes, each one spilling into the next.

The park sits in the mountains of central Croatia, near the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. Twelve upper lakes lie in a wide forested valley, and four lower lakes sit in a narrow limestone canyon.

Water drops about 133 meters from the highest lake to the lowest. More than 90 waterfalls connect them, including Veliki Slap, the tallest in Croatia at 78 meters.

The water changes color through the day. It shifts between turquoise, green, blue, and gray depending on the minerals, the sunlight, and the tiny organisms living in it.

Plitvice became Croatia's first national park on April 8, 1949. In 1979, UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List, among the first natural sites ever chosen.

The park went through a hard time in the 1990s. Fighting broke out here in March 1991, one of the first clashes of the war that followed Croatia's independence, and the park was occupied for years.

The lakes survived. After the war, workers cleared mines from the trails and rebuilt the boardwalks, and UNESCO took the park off its danger list in 1997.

Walk the wooden boardwalks, which run about 18 kilometers across and beside the water. Ride the electric boat across Lake Kozjak, the largest in the park. Bring a jacket and don't plan on swimming, since the water is cold year-round and swimming is banned to protect the travertine.