Biokovo Nature Park

Biokovo is the wall of grey limestone standing directly behind Makarska and its neighbouring beach towns, rising from sea level to well over 1,700 metres in the space of a few kilometres. It is the reason the Makarska Riviera looks the way it does, and it is one of the few places in Dalmatia where you can go from swimming to near-alpine rock in under an hour's drive. The protected core of the massif is Biokovo Nature Park, and almost everything visitors come for, from the summit road and the Skywalk to the botanical garden and the chamois, sits inside it.

A Karst Wall Above the Adriatic

The Biokovo massif runs roughly 36 kilometres along the coast and reaches about 9 kilometres inland, positioned between the Cetina and the Neretva rivers. It was declared a nature park in 1981, with the protected area covering 19,550 hectares. Structurally it belongs to the Dinaric Alps, the chain running from Slovenia down through Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro into Albania, thrown up when the African and Eurasian plates collided towards the end of the Cretaceous, roughly 65 million years ago.

The rock is limestone, dolomite, breccia and flysch, weathered into textbook karst: bare pavement, sinkholes, dry-stone terracing and almost no surface water at all. Rain that falls on Biokovo disappears into the rock rather than running off it, which is why the mountain reads as arid from the sea despite receiving considerably more precipitation than the coast below. Steepness is the other defining feature. The rampart towers roughly 1,500 metres above the Riviera, and the horizontal distance between shoreline and ridge is short enough that the entire face fits into a single view from a boat deck.

That geology now carries an international label. On 28 March 2024, at the 219th session of the UNESCO Executive Board in Paris, the Biokovo-Imotski Lakes Geopark was declared Croatia's third UNESCO Global Geopark. It covers 431 square kilometres, taking in the mountain itself along with the town of Imotski, thirteen municipalities and a resident population somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000. Beyond the massif it also protects the Imotski karst lakes, among them the Red Lake, the deepest karst lake in Europe, formed by the collapse of a very large doline, and the Blue Lake beside it, plus several hundred archaeological sites ranging from antiquity to the medieval stecak tombstones.

Sveti Jure, the Summit Road and the Highest Church in Croatia

The highest point of Biokovo, and the target of most visits, is Sveti Jure at 1,762 metres. Depending on how peaks are classified it ranks as the second or third highest summit in Croatia behind Dinara, while Biokovo as a whole is the country's second-highest mountain range. Its topographic prominence is 1,168 metres, and the massif's second peak, Sveti Ilija, reaches 1,642 metres. Vosac, at about 1,421 metres and roughly 2.5 kilometres above Makarska, is the classic short objective for walkers not committing to the full climb.

Access is by the Biokovo road, the highest road in Croatia. It leaves the coast near Makarska and climbs some 31 kilometres to the summit area; from the park entrance at around 365 metres the single-lane asphalt section runs about 23 kilometres, with passing lay-bys spaced roughly every 300 metres. The route was extended in the mid-1960s and asphalted in 1979. Because it is genuinely single-lane for most of its length, entry is metered in the busy season at something on the order of 25 vehicles per hour.

The true summit is fenced off. A television transmitter mast of roughly 80 to 90 metres, built by Television Zagreb in the mid-1960s, occupies the top and takes the highest structural point to around 1,850 metres. About fifty metres below the summit stands the chapel of St George, Sveti Jure itself, the highest church in Croatia. Its origins are murky: it appears to have been built or rebuilt in the 13th century, and its existence is first recorded in writing only in 1640. The old chapel was demolished in 1965 to make way for the transmitter and rebuilt in 1968 in concrete faced with stone. The feast of St George falls on 23 April, but at that altitude the weather rarely cooperates, so the annual Mass is held on the last Saturday of July instead.

The view is the payoff. On a clear day it takes in the whole Makarska Riviera, Brac and Hvar, the Dalmatian hinterland and the mountains of Bosnia and Herzegovina; in exceptional visibility the Apennines have been recorded from here, some 252 kilometres away across the Adriatic. The mountain is not benign, though. Between 1976 and 2007, 24 hikers died on Biokovo and 37 had to be rescued, a consequence of loose karst underfoot, very little shade and weather that can turn from Mediterranean to alpine within an hour.

The Skywalk, the Botanical Garden and the Marked Trails

The Biokovo Skywalk, completed in 2020, is the park's most photographed structure: a horseshoe of glass and steel at an altitude of 1,228 metres, cantilevered around 12 metres beyond the cliff edge with a transparent floor over the drop to the coast. It sits along the summit road well below the top, and visits are timed to keep the platform from overcrowding.

Much lower down, above the village of Kotisina and roughly three kilometres from Makarska, is the Kotisina Botanical Garden, founded in 1984 by the Franciscan friar and botanist Jure Radic. Rather than a formal garden it is a fenced stretch of hillside between about 350 and 500 metres of elevation, conceived as Biokovo in miniature and holding around 300 species native to the massif, the endemic Biokovo bellflower among them. Directly above it stand the walls of a fortress known as the Kastel, built into the rock face in the 17th century during the Cretan War, when the population of the coastal villages retreated up the mountain. The park also runs a visitor centre in the middle of Makarska.

For anyone who would rather walk than drive, the park maintains a set of marked and interpreted trails, most of them modest in length. The geological trail from Makar up to Vosac is the busiest, with panels explaining the Middle Jurassic limestone that makes up much of the massif, laid down between roughly 172 and 174 million years ago. The Kaoci trail runs about 8 kilometres and takes around two hours, passing three restored wells, rest areas and a forest lodge with a small education centre. The Artillery Trail, some 1.5 kilometres long, follows First World War fortifications with five panels along the way, while the Paths of Ancient Berulia take about an hour past a 17th-century church, old village buildings, wells and the remains of a 13th-century monastery. The French Road above Brela is a different kind of relic: an early 19th-century engineered route between roughly 357 and 444 metres of altitude, built to a maximum gradient of six per cent, which was a serious piece of work for the time and the terrain.

Endemic Plants, Chamois and a Karst Underworld

Biokovo supports more than 1,500 recorded plant and animal species, an unusual concentration explained by the compression of climate zones across a very short vertical distance: Mediterranean scrub at the bottom, sub-Mediterranean and montane vegetation in the middle, and near-alpine conditions on the summit ridge. Isolation has produced genuine endemics, the best known being the Biokovo bellflower, alongside Centaurea gloriosa and Moltkea petraea. Dalmatian black pine and Aleppo pine cover parts of the lower slopes, and the recorded flora also includes Lilium martagon, Edraianthus pumilio and Drypis spinosa.

The signature large mammal is the Balkan chamois, reintroduced to Biokovo in 1964 and now well established on the higher crags; European mouflon has also been introduced. Griffon vultures and other raptors work the updraughts along the escarpment.

Beneath the surface the karst is riddled with cavities. More than 400 speleological features have been identified inside the park, several among the deepest in Croatia: Njemica reaches 983 metres below the surface, Mokre noge 831 metres and Amfora 788 metres, pits that plunge nearly as far down as the mountain rises above the sea.

Makarska lies roughly 60 kilometres south of Split, directly beneath the escarpment, and the Skywalk and summit road are easily managed as a half-day trip from the harbour, which is why many gulet cruises from Split call in here before continuing down the Dalmatian coast.