Slovenia in 4 days: Ljubljana, Bled and the Soča

Slovenia is the country I most underestimated. It is smaller than Wales, more than half of it is forest, and you can go from the Adriatic to an alpine valley in under three hours. Four days felt short and was still enough to see genuinely different landscapes.

The route

• Day 1: Ljubljana
• Day 2: Lake Bled and Vintgar
• Day 3: the Soča valley
• Day 4: Piran and the coast

I hired a car from day two. Ljubljana does not need one and parking in the centre is restricted.

Day 1: Ljubljana

A capital of under 300,000 people with a car-free centre, a river through the middle lined with cafés, and a castle on the hill reachable by funicular or a twenty-minute walk.

The whole city is walkable in a day: the Triple Bridge, the central market with its riverside colonnade, the dragon bridge, and Metelkova - a former army barracks squatted by artists in the nineties and still covered in murals and sculpture made from scrap.

Evening on the river bank, where the entire population appears to eat outside from May to September.

Day 2: Bled and Vintgar

Fifty minutes from Ljubljana. Lake Bled is on every poster of Slovenia and the poster is accurate: an island with a church in the middle of a green lake, a castle on a cliff above it.

Two things worth doing properly. First, walk the six kilometres around the lake rather than only standing at the viewpoints - it takes ninety minutes and the light changes completely. Second, take a pletna boat to the island and climb the 99 steps to ring the wishing bell.

In the afternoon, the Vintgar Gorge four kilometres away: a wooden walkway pinned to the rock above a river running through a narrow limestone cut. It now uses timed entry in summer, so book it.

If you have the extra hours, Lake Bohinj twenty minutes further on is bigger, wilder and has a fraction of the visitors.

Day 3: the Soča valley

This was the day I did not expect. The Vršič Pass climbs over the Julian Alps in fifty hairpin bends, each one numbered, built by prisoners of war in 1915. It is open roughly May to October and closed by snow the rest of the year.

On the far side the Soča river runs an unreal turquoise the whole way down the valley - not glacier-blue but a green-blue that photographs look edited. Kobarid at the bottom has a museum about the Italian front of the First World War that is one of the best small museums I have been to anywhere.

The valley is also where a great deal of Slovenia's rafting, canyoning and kayaking happens. I walked instead, along the river to the Tolmin gorges.

Day 4: Piran

Slovenia's coastline is 46 kilometres long - you can drive it in under an hour - and Piran is the reason to go. A Venetian town on a narrow peninsula, red roofs, a marble square that was the inner harbour until it was filled in, and a bell tower copied from St Mark's.

Cars stop at a garage outside the walls and a shuttle bus takes you in, which is why the town still works. Climb the tower, walk the sea wall, eat fish, and swim off the rocks rather than looking for sand, because there is not any.

Distances, which are the whole point

Leg	Driving
Ljubljana → Bled	50 min
Bled → Bovec (Vršič Pass)	1 h 45
Bovec → Ljubljana (valley route)	2 h
Ljubljana → Piran	1 h 30

Note that a motorway vignette is compulsory and must be bought before you join the motorway. Hire cars usually have one; check, because the fine does not care that you did not know.

Notes

• Brown bears are genuinely present in the southern forests, within an hour of the capital. You will not see one from the road.
• Slovenia is 58% forest and the proportion has been rising for decades.
• Postojna and Škocjan caves are both an easy detour if you have a fifth day. Škocjan is the wilder of the two.
• Everyone under fifty speaks excellent English, which makes the whole country very easy to travel.