Una Gorge in March
Snowmelt makes the Una the colour of glaciers in early spring. We took eight people in and brought them back speechless.
The Una National Park gets most of its visitors between June and September, when the waterfalls are photographed ten thousand times a day and the trails are shared with tour buses. We prefer March. The park is almost entirely empty, the water is running high and fast from snowmelt in the Dinaric Alps, and the colour — a cold, luminous turquoise — is unlike anything you will see in summer.
This month's group departed from Sarajevo at seven. By nine-thirty we were walking the canyon rim above Martin Brod, where the Una drops through a series of falls before widening into a pool that looks implausible. One of the group asked our guide Haris if this was real. He said he had been coming here for twenty years and still asked himself the same question.
We did a circuit of about fourteen kilometres over five hours, stopping twice for coffee in the only village open that time of year. The drive back to Sarajevo felt too short. We are running the same route again in April — write to us if you want a place on that one.