Velika Planina
Interesting facts
- The oldest-style hut on the plateau, the Preskar hut, has no windows or chimney, and its shingles run unbroken from the ridge right down to the ground.
- In the winter of 1931–32 a new kind of tourism was born here, known as bajtarstvo: renting the herders' huts to skiers while the cattle were down in the valley.
- Archaeological finds show people were on the plateau in prehistoric times, long before herders settled it in the Middle Ages.
- Plečnik modelled his chapel of Our Lady of the Snows on the herders' huts around it, and the rebuilt chapel is known for its Christmas Eve midnight mass.
- Two natural pits on the plateau, Velika and Mala Vetrnica, are former caves whose roofs collapsed, leaving deep sinkholes in the pasture.
- The cable car from the Kamniška Bistrica valley was opened on 13 September 1964 and turned the remote pasture into a year-round mountain resort.
- Artificial snowmaking is not allowed on the plateau, so its roughly 6 km of ski runs depend entirely on natural snowfall.
- Velika Planina became an administrative settlement in its own right only in 1985, when it was separated from the neighbouring village of Žaga.
- The 2002 census recorded just four permanent residents, though herders still bring cattle up to the summer pastures every year.
- Besides trnič cheese, the herders were known for hand-carved wooden spoons, knives and ladles, and for capes worn as protection against rain.
Why it is worth it
High above the Kamnik valley, a wide green plateau at around 1,500 to 1,600 metres is scattered with more than a hundred wooden herdsmen's huts, each one oval in plan and covered by a dark shingle roof that sweeps almost down to the grass. Seen from a distance the settlement looks like a village of beehives or upturned boats, and it is counted as the largest high-mountain pastoral plateau in Slovenia and one of the few herding settlements of its kind left on this scale in Europe.
Velika Planina lies in the Kamnik-Savinja Alps north of the town of Kamnik and covers about 5.8 square kilometres, with its highest point, Gradišče, at 1,666 metres. Together with the neighbouring pastures of Mala Planina and Gojška Planina it forms one large summer grazing ground. The traditional hut was a single room, and its long low roof gave shelter both to the herdsman and to the cattle that stood under its eaves. The oldest hut foundations found here go back to the sixteenth century, and one hut of the old type, the Preskar hut, is kept as a small museum of herding life. The herdsmen are also known for trnič, a small pear-shaped dried cheese.
The settlement has been rebuilt more than once. In the winter of 1944 to 1945, during the Second World War, German forces and their collaborators burned all the huts on the plateau, together with the chapel of Our Lady of the Snows, built in 1938 to a design by the architect Jože Plečnik. The huts were rebuilt after the war, and the chapel was rebuilt in 1988 following a proposal by the architect Vlasto Kopač. Since 1964 a cable car has climbed to the plateau from the valley of Kamniška Bistrica, and the gentle slopes are used for skiing in winter and walking in summer.
Getting there
The valley station of the cable car is in Kamniška Bistrica, north of Kamnik; from the upper station a chairlift and footpaths lead to the herdsmen's settlement. The nearest large city is Ljubljana, about 30 km away in a straight line, and the nearest airport is Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport (LJU), about 17 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Velika Planina is a dispersed high-elevation settlement of mostly herders' dwellings on the karst Big Pasture Plateau in the Kamnik Alps in Upper Carniola region of Slovenia.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
46.29694, 14.65194per Wikidata