One moment…
Julian Alps, Slovenia
Meadows of the Julian Alps
A week walking valley to valley through alpine Slovenia — haymeadows, the emerald Soča, one night in a high mountain hut, and food with a first name on it.
7 daysMax 10 travelersJune – SeptemberFrom £2,760 per person
WalkingMountainFood & craft
This journey crosses the Julian Alps the old way: on foot between valleys, sleeping low in family pensions and high — for one night — in a mountain hut above the treeline. The walking is honest but never extreme; the point is the meadows, forests, and villages between the summits, not the summits themselves.
Along the way we eat almost entirely from the valleys we walk through: mountain cheese aged in cellars we visit, Soča trout, honey from painted hives, and one memorable dinner cooked on a haymeadow farm that has hosted travelers since the Habsburgs.
Day by day
The shape of the week
Itineraries are a promise of rhythm, not a timetable. Weather, harvests, and good conversations are allowed to rearrange the day.
Day 1
Ljubljana to the mountains
Meet in Ljubljana and drive an hour north into the mountains, to a family pension beneath the Karavanke ridge. Evening orientation walk through the haymeadows and dinner from the farm next door.
Day 2
Haymeadows and beehives
Walk the meadow paths to Radovljica through fields still cut by hand each July. Afternoon with a third-generation beekeeper — tasting, and learning to read the painted panels on the hives.
Days 3–4
Over the pass to the Soča
Two days crossing into the Trenta valley: up through larch forest to a night in a mountain hut with dinner at long shared tables, then down the headwaters of the Soča as the river turns its impossible green.
Day 5
The emerald river
A level day following the Soča’s gorges toward Bovec. Swim where the canyon opens out — brief and cold and worth it — and picnic on the gravel bars. Evening at a trout farm table.
Day 6
Cheese cellars of the Krn pastures
Climb to the high pastures under Krn where herders summer their cattle, taste cheese straight from the cellar, and walk down through WWI heritage paths above Kobarid for a final-night dinner at Slovenia’s most quietly famous kitchen.
Day 7
Return through the Vršič
Cross back over the Vršič pass with pauses at its Russian chapel and viewpoints, arriving into Ljubljana by mid-afternoon for onward travel.
Your guide
Ana Zupan
Ana is an internationally certified mountain guide and a beekeeper’s daughter from the Bohinj valley. She spent five seasons cooking in a high mountain hut before deciding she preferred walking people up to dinner instead. Her journeys are famous for arriving at exactly the right meadow at exactly the right hour.
Bohinj, Slovenia
Traveler stories
From people who walked it
“A week that tasted like the valley it crossed”
The hut night alone was worth the fare — dinner at long tables, dawn over Triglav, coffee outside in the cold. But what stays with us is the food, all of it from farms we had walked past that same day. Ana times her days like a conductor. Ten out of ten, and we are picky.
Henrik & Lena Voss
Hamburg, Germany
“Slow travel that actually means it”
Plenty of companies say slow; Verdara schedules it. Unhurried mornings, whole afternoons at a beekeeper’s or by the river, and not one moment of being herded. The Soča swim is colder than they let on — bring courage. Would go again tomorrow.
Graham O’Dowd
Cork, Ireland
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Questions about Meadows of the Julian Alps?
Dates, fitness, rooms, dietary needs, whether the swim is really optional — ask us anything. A person answers, not an autoresponder.