Tara River

Interesting facts

The Tara gorge is nicknamed the Tear of Europe and ranks as the deepest canyon in continental Europe, at about 1,300 metres.

In 1942 Yugoslav Partisans blew up one arch of the Đurđevića Tara Bridge, helped by one of its own engineers, Lazar Jauković, to halt the Italian advance.

Jauković was later captured and executed by the Italians on the very bridge he had helped to build; the span was rebuilt in 1946.

The bridge's wartime story inspired the 1969 Yugoslav film Most (The Bridge) and a 1956 Dutch novel by A. den Doolaard.

Water from the Bučevica Cave tumbles into the Tara from more than 30 metres up, across a front over 150 metres wide.

Along its course the river is fed by more than 40 cascades and runs through dozens of rapids, whose roar carries up to the canyon rims.

Inside Durmitor National Park the river falls about 3.6 metres for every kilometre, producing whitewater graded from 2 to 4.

The canyon walls hide more than 80 large caves, along with pebbly terraces and small sandy beaches at river level.

For its last 36 kilometres the canyon forms the border between Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where it is protected as Tara Nature Park.

Why it is worth it

The Tara is the river that carved the deepest canyon in Europe. It rises in the Komovi mountains of Montenegro, where the Opasnica and Veruša streams meet, and flows 146 kilometres north-west, almost all of them in or along the edge of Montenegro, until it joins the Piva at Šćepan Polje on the Bosnian border; together the two become the Drina, a tributary of the Danube system. The name alone means little abroad, but the gorge it has cut through the limestone is on a scale with few rivals on the continent.

The Tara Canyon runs for tens of kilometres beneath the plateaus of Durmitor, with walls reaching about 1,300 metres at the deepest point. From above you see a thread of blue-green water between forested slopes and bare grey cliffs; from the river itself, the walls close overhead and side streams fall in as waterfalls. The canyon was named a UNESCO biosphere reserve in 1977, and its middle reaches belong to Durmitor National Park, a World Heritage site. The water is clean enough to sustain a rare population of huchen, the Danube salmon, globally endangered and here still spawning.

The one great human mark on the canyon is the Đurđevića Tara Bridge, built between 1937 and 1940 to a design by Mijat Trojanović. It is a white concrete bridge of five arches, 365 metres long, with a central span of 116 metres, and its deck stands well over 150 metres above the water; when finished it was the largest concrete arch road bridge in Europe. Seen from the viewpoints nearby, its pale arches against the green gorge are the classic picture of the Tara. Below, the river is one of Europe's great rafting runs, and it hosted the World Rafting Championships in 2009.

Getting there

The lower Tara meets the Piva on the border between Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina; Goražde, the nearest large town, is about 37 km away, and Sarajevo International Airport (SJJ) about 67 km. Rafting trips run on the lower canyon towards the confluence, while the Đurđevića Tara Bridge and the canyon viewpoints are usually reached from Žabljak, the mountain town of Durmitor.

From the encyclopaedia

The Tara is a river in Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. It emerges from the confluence of the Opasnica and Veruša rivers in the Komovi Mountains, part of the Dinaric Alps of Montenegro. The total length is 143 km (89 mi), of which 141 km (88 mi) are in or on the border of Montenegro, it also forms the border between the two countries in several places. The Tara flows from south to north-northwest and converges with the Piva at the Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro border between the villages of Šćepan Polje (Montenegro) and Hum to form the Drina river.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Tara River

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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From the encyclopaedia