Velebit National Park

12 September 2018

We left Zagreb in our little rental VW Up, Duncan desperately trying to remember to drive on the right, and frequently slamming his left fist into his side door every time he tried to change gears. We drove through beautiful countryside on windy roads to our destination, the Velebit National Park. A short walk from the car park brought us to the Botanical Garden; a far cry from planted flower beds, but wild and stark and beautiful. In the centre of the garden is a large sinkhole with a short trail around the edge, and diverging off this path are trails up the many surrounding 1600m peaks. We made our way up to the summit of Balinovac, and admired the views over the Adriatic and the barren islands adjacent to the coast.

We then joined the Premuzic Trail, laid out constructed in the 1930’s by the engineer Ante Premuzic. The trail is constructed using local rock and a drystone technique, and is considered a masterpiece of trail-building. It is mostly level, with the aim to allow easy access to remote parts of the Velebit Mountain range without any steep ascents or descents. In total, it is 57km long, however we had limited time. We walked to Rossi’s shelter, an inviting mountain hut as our turn-around point, all the while enjoying the interesting landscape of white limestone, green conifers with deep sinkholes on either side of the ridge.

We made it back to the car by about 6pm, with an estimated hour and a half drive to our next accommodation in the town of Starigrad. Duncan suggested taking the scenic route along the coast. I had read about Starigrad as one of the oldest towns in Europe, rich in history and in an agriculturally significant valley that is now a UNESCO heritage site.

Turns out “Stari Grad” translates to “Old Town”, and Croatia has many of them. After about an hour and a half of driving, we reached the wrong Starigrad, still another hour and a half up the coast from the town, Starigrad Paklencia, that we were aiming for. We were on a very very windy coastal road, it was dark and slow going. It took me another day or so to realise that the very average looking coastal town we were staying in was not agriculturally significant in the least, nor was it a world heritage site. That Stari Grad is on the island of Hvar.