Pliva Waterfall
Pliva
Interesting facts
- The 1899 Pliva power station, built by the company of the Austrian industrialist Josef Kranz, fed what was then Europe's largest calcium carbide factory.
- The first hydroelectric plant in Southeast Europe, Jajce-1, began generating on 24 March 1899 with a capacity of about 8 megawatts.
- Along the Pliva, travertine barriers like the one forming the waterfall are built by moss, algae and bacteria and grow by roughly a centimetre a year.
- The flow over the waterfall is regulated: about 3 cubic metres per second is kept as a biological minimum for the river.
- The Pliva is only about 27 kilometres long, rising from two powerful karst springs at the foot of the mountains near Šipovo.
- The little wooden watermills between the Pliva lakes ground local farmers' wheat into flour until around the Second World War.
- A UNESCO project with the Swedish group Cultural Heritage without Borders restored the old houses that form the town's classic view with the waterfall.
- Jajce's Roman temple of Mithras is counted among the best preserved in Europe and was found by chance while a private house was being built.
- The catacombs beneath the old town are thought to be the tomb prepared by Hrvoje Vukčić Hrvatinić, the nobleman credited with founding Jajce.
Why it is worth it
In the middle of Jajce, a medieval royal town in central Bosnia, the Pliva River throws itself over a wall of travertine straight into the Vrbas, so that one of the country's best-known waterfalls drops right beneath the houses and the fortress of the old town. The Pliva Waterfall, about 22 metres high and some 30 metres wide, is a natural tufa barrier: limestone-rich water has been building it up for millennia, depositing calcite where the river leaves its narrow karst gorge at the contact between limestone and flysch.
The falls were once higher, around 30 metres. During the Bosnian War the Jajce-1 hydroelectric plant upstream was caught in the fighting and put out of service; a sudden surge of water damaged the travertine body of the waterfall, and the flooding that followed, together with an earthquake, left it at its present height. That power plant has its own place in history: built on the Pliva in 1899 under Austro-Hungarian rule, it was the first hydroelectric station in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the Balkans, and the Hungarian painter Csontváry Kosztka Tivadar painted it in 1903.
Jajce itself grew up around a fortress first mentioned by name in 1396 and became the seat of the last kings of independent Bosnia; King Stjepan Tomašević was crowned here and executed by the Ottomans in 1463. Its walls, gates and citadel, the underground catacombs, and a 2nd-century Roman temple of Mithras are all part of the "Natural and Architectural Ensemble of Jajce", which, waterfall included, is on UNESCO's Tentative List. In 1943 the town hosted the second session of AVNOJ, the wartime Anti-Fascist Council of National Liberation of Yugoslavia, in a Sokol hall of 1934 that is now a museum. A few kilometres upstream, between the Great and Little Pliva lakes, a cluster of small wooden watermills is preserved as a national monument.
Getting there
The waterfall is in the town of Jajce, at the confluence of the Pliva and the Vrbas, which lies at the crossroads of the roads to Banja Luka, Mrkonjić Grad and Donji Vakuf. Bugojno is about 34 km away. The nearest airport is Banja Luka International Airport (BNX), about 67 km away.
Plan your visit
We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.
Nearby places
- Pliva River Watermills 3.7 km · watermill
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Pliva Waterfall is located by the town of Jajce, in central Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the river Pliva meets the river Vrbas. The waterfall is a large tufa barrier, making a cascade in a narrow karstic zone, which follows the Pliva course, retracted into a flysh and limestone contact zone. It was 30 meters high, but after an earthquake during the Bosnian war and attacks on the power plant further up the river, the area was flooded and now the waterfall is 22 meters high.
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