Premužić Trail, Croatia

Zagreb is scaffolded, still in a state of repair after the 2020 earthquake that struck hours after the city went into lockdown. There are rules for when there is an earthquake, but when there is an earthquake at the same time as there is a global pandemic, then it’s a much more complex situation.

We have time enough to wander the streets and visit the enchanting Gallery of Naive Art and the poignant Museum of Broken Relationships but we are here to walk the Premužić Trail with our Zagreb-based friend Kaylee. Early one morning, we leave the city and drive up through mist and fog to the Zavižan mountain refuge, the start of the walk.

Even though the 55-kilometre trail starts at 1,687 metres and leads into the roughest and craggiest parts of the Northern Velebit mountains, the way is gently undulating. Ante Premužić, an engineer and passionate mountaineer, designed the route to be like this so that as many people as possible could experience the beauty of the Velebit. The trail itself is the enduring legacy of the local master craftsmen who built it in the 1930s, using drystone techniques.

The first part of today’s walk passes through the most protected and dramatic area of the Northern Velebit. The extraordinary karst landscape was formed by ancient earthquakes and the flow of water and ice over broken rock. The grandeur is breathtaking; starkly beautiful walls of fractured rock, rugged peaks, deep green sinkholes and caverns, some over 1,000 metres deep. Speleologists are still exploring the mysterious underground world of the Velebit and finding undreamt-of wonders.

Clearing the sheer, silvery-grey limestone walls, we come out into high meadows lush with soft green grasses and alpine wildflowers before entering the Northern Velebit’s ancient and primaeval beech forests.

Orchids, peonies and blue honeysuckle. Tree trunks with the hammer marks of woodpeckers. Beech, spruce, silver fir and a gnarled dwarf mountain pine, found only in the alpine regions of Croatia. The diversity of plant life held in this pristine landscape is extraordinary.

We take a break at a small mountain shelter and chat with three Croatian women walking in the opposite direction to us. One of them, a sustainability educator, was in Australia last year, attending a conference and visiting her cousin. “We hadn’t seen each other since the war”, she says, referring to the Homeland War of the early 1990s, fought after Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. The war was brutal. As well as the lives lost and infrastructure destroyed, many people became displaced, some of them, like this woman’s cousin, ending up in Australia.

We continue, in and out of mossy green forests where European brown bears, grey wolves and lynxes roam. We’re sure we see bear paw prints and smell the scent of wild animals, but the bears remain elusive. Walkers see them from time to time and occasionally they make forays out of the secluded parts of the forest to raid the summer hives of honey gatherers.

Towards the end of the day, we catch sight of the Adriatic and its hazy islands.

On our first night out we stay at Alan Hut, an old foresters haunt. There’s a small gathering of walkers from across Europe, the US & Australia, including a young Irishman walking the 7,000-kilometre Trans European Route, from the Black Sea to the Atlantic. The hut wardens provide a simple and tasty meal of bean stew and sausage served with a cold beer to wash it down.

As the sun sets we sit contentedly gazing out to sea, surrounded by expanses of grassland, rugged peaks, drystone walls and old shepherd’s huts. We all agree that today’s walk was one of the most beautiful imaginable.

The air is cool this morning, the sea still, the vegetation glistening with dew.

We climb up from the hut to reach a grassy ridgeline. From our high vantage point, we can see across the long, narrow islands of the Adriatic to Italy. Turning inland, we make out the traces of fields, animal enclosures and farm buildings. It is like looking down at an archeological site. Farmers used to spend the summers up here in the Velebit, tending their herds and cultivating fields. In autumn, they would descend back down towards the coast, carrying on their backs and those of their donkeys the hay and crops they needed to survive the winter. Semi-nomadic livestock herding is now extinct in Velebit. The only memories of this way of life are the imprints left on the landscape and some still-standing summer huts.

There’s a profusion of wildflowers growing where the moisture from clouds and mist has created fissures in the rocks; white, yellow and all shades of pink from the palest pastel to the deepest crimson. The air is honey-sweet with them.

More glittering sea and sky and wildflower meadows. Buttercups, Solomon’s seal, cornflowers, iris and chrysanthemum. Rock lizards and vipers. A woodpecker at work. Fractured rocks patterned with grey-blue lichens. A forest of sub-alpine beech trees, their trunks bent at the base by the pressure of winter snow. Eagles riding the thermals. The track through the forest, soft underfoot with autumn’s fallen leaves. Patches of wild strawberries. Metallic blue and green beetles. The most exquisite of butterflies, their wings outlined in silver.

Tonight’s shelter, the Skorpovac shelter, is smaller and less well-kept than Alan’s hut. It’s in a village that was abandoned after WW2. All that’s left are the ruins of stone houses and animal enclosures. During the Homeland War, the mountaineers who knew and loved the Velebit formed a Mountain Unit and held this territory through the harsh winters of the war.

There’s no food available and no running water. But you can draw water from a well and, in our case, have Davor, who is providing us with logistical support, cook a delicious meal, lend us a tent to sleep in and thoughtfully answer our endless questions about Croatia and its neighbours.

Strange creatures move about as we lay in our tent in the darkness. A small bear or a deer perhaps. Davor says he saw a chamois high up on the ridge line yesterday.

Before we leave in the morning, we wander around the lost village. It’s intriguing. Who lived here? What were their lives like in this high, cold, remote place? Are their ancestors drawn back here?

The day promises forests, wild pastures and stunning vistas. It doesn’t disappoint. We set off on a narrow meandering track fringed with wildflowers, one of which smells like chocolate. Later in the day, the air is pungent with the scent of wild thyme.

Walking across meadows with views of a turquoise sea and layers of pale islands. Then through a forest of beech, downy oaks, maples and silver fir. The forestry department says that they take far fewer trees from the forest than the forest grows annually. As inferior trees are mostly selected, we conclude that our forests are becoming more beautiful the more they are managed. We ask Davor if there is any truth to this claim. He says that in the main the forests are well managed, although rogue operators do exist..

We meet only one other walker on the trail today. Martina is from Slovenia but her father grew up in a nearby village. She spends part of each summer here, walking in the mountains in the morning and swimming in the sea in the afternoon.

The track widens and we enter a rural world of farmhouses, barns, pastures, stone fences and horses. Backed by high rocky peaks, it’s like an illustration from an old children’s storybook.

Our walk ends in the charming mountain village of Baške Oštarije. We’ll spend the night in a hostel here before returning to Zagreb. It’s located at 926 metres above sea level and is surrounded by ruggedly beautiful mountains. We sit in the garden of the hostel’s restaurant and toast the beauty of the Velebit. Our days on the Premužić Trail were captivating and we’ll long dream of fabled beech forests, majestic karst mountains and a world coloured by alpine wildflowers and tattooed butterflies.

Our Premužić Trail walk was a self-guided walk provided by Go Explore Croatia. We chose Go Explore Croatia because they’re a local company with an excellent reputation and sustainable/ethical credentials.

You might also be interested in our story of walking the Magna Via Francigena in Sicily, the Via degli Dei (Path of Gods) in Italy, or the Three Capes Track in Tasmania, Australia.

Disclosure
We do not receive payments, commissions, or freebies. While we might mention a specific product/service or link to another website that we’ve used, there are likely to be alternatives and we encourage you to assess what best suits your needs.