Plitvice Lakes National Park
Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera
- UNESCO World Heritage
- UNESCO natural beauty
Interesting facts
- Plitvice was among the very first natural sites on the World Heritage List, inscribed in 1979 and extended in 2000.
- Its Veliki slap, the Great Waterfall, plunges 78 metres.
- From the highest lake to the lowest the water drops 133 metres in total.
- Kozjak, the largest lake, is 47 metres deep, while Prošćansko, the highest of the large lakes, reaches 37 metres.
- The upper lakes lie on dolomite bedrock, while the lower lakes sit in a limestone canyon.
- Inside the park, the virgin forest of Čorkova uvala holds beech and fir trees up to 700 years old.
- About 50 mammal species live in the park, among them brown bears, grey wolves and Eurasian lynx.
- Several Winnetou westerns based on Karl May's novels were filmed here between 1962 and 1968.
- The name Plitvice was first recorded in writing in 1777, by Dominik Vukasović.
- In 2024 the park received nearly 1.5 million visitors, almost a tenth of all tourist arrivals in Croatia.
Why it is worth it
The barriers that create Plitvice's sixteen terraced lakes are, in a very real sense, alive — or at least built by living things. As water flows over limestone, it releases dissolved carbon dioxide, which shifts the water's chemistry so that calcium carbonate starts crystallising out of solution. Left alone, that process would just leave mineral crusts. What actually happens here is that mosses, algae and cyanobacteria growing on every submerged surface trap those crystals and keep building on them, layer by layer, into travertine barriers that dam the river's flow and stack the lakes into their famous cascading terraces. It's ecosystem engineering on a geological timescale: the active barriers are estimated at six to seven thousand years old, dating to just after the last Ice Age, while older fossil barriers higher up the slopes go back as far as 300,000 years — and the living barriers are still growing today, at roughly one to three centimetres a year.
That means the landscape people photograph is never finished; it's mid-construction, permanently. The famous shifts in the water's colour — turquoise, green, grey, depending on mineral content, sunlight angle and the season — come from exactly the same chemistry that's building the barriers, which is part of why the colour looks different every time someone visits rather than being some kind of seasonal trick.
Plitvice was declared Croatia's first national park in 1949, but it has a harder history than the postcards suggest. In 1991, right at the outbreak of the war following Yugoslavia's breakup, the park area saw some of the earliest armed clashes of the conflict, and it was closed to visitors for years afterward — first for safety, then because parts of the surrounding area had to be cleared of landmines before anyone could safely return to the trails. It reopened gradually through the 1990s, and the fact that it's now one of the most visited natural sites in the Balkans is itself part of the park's story, not separate from it.
Getting there
21 km from Bihać. Zadar Airport (ZAD) is about 90 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Plitvice Lakes National Park is one of the oldest and largest national parks in Croatia. In 1979, Plitvice Lakes National Park was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, for its outstanding and picturesque series of tufa lakes, caves, and connected waterfalls.
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