5 Days in Zlatibor

Start at the King's Fountain (Kraljeva česma), the small stone fountain where the whole story of Zlatibor as a resort begins. On 20 August 1893 King Aleksandar Obrenović stopped here at the Kulaševac spring, the spring was renamed Kraljeva Voda, and the fountain went up a year later. Belgrade's high society followed, and villas began to appear around it.

From the fountain, walk around the lake, which was dug by youth work brigades in 1946-47 and completely rebuilt in 2020-22. In summer evenings a floating fountain in the middle puts on a show of water jets, lights and video. At the start of the promenade, look for the wooden statue of Era with his horse, a caravan trader from an old Zlatibor postcard. Three hundred meters away rises the big Church of the Transfiguration, the landmark of the modern town.

The Zlatibor market is where the plateau's farmers sell what has made the region famous: young white cheese, kajmak, honey, rakija, woolen socks and sweaters, and pršut, beef and pork dried in the cold mountain air. Walk along the stalls and taste. Sellers will cut you a sliver of anything before you buy.

Start with the kajmak. It's made by slowly heating milk, skimming off the skin that forms on top and layering it in a wooden tub, and on Zlatibor it's thick, salty and slightly sour. Young (mladi) kajmak is fresh and creamy; old (stari) kajmak, aged for weeks, is yellow, crumbly and sharp. Buy a little of each and some bread for a picnic.

After lunch, spend the afternoon at Čigota, a health institute that has treated thyroid and weight problems for decades and opens its pool and wellness center to outside visitors. There's a half-Olympic indoor pool at 26°C, saunas, a steam bath and a salt room, and it's the easiest way to try Zlatibor's spa side without booking into a hotel.

A lit footpath, a favorite evening walk for locals, leads about 2.3 km out of town through the pines to Šumatno brdo, a low hill with a white obelisk 10 m tall. It marks a grave. In November and December 1941, after the fall of the short-lived Partisan Republic of Užice, wounded Partisans were shot at Kraljeve Vode and Palisad, and their remains lie in the ossuary here (1961), with the obelisk above it (1967). It's why Kraljeve Vode was renamed Partizanske Vode in 1946, a name it kept until 1991.

The hill is also one of the best viewpoints close to town, with the plateau rolling away in every direction. Time it for the hour before sunset, when the meadows turn gold.

For a first dinner of mountain food, take a short taxi ride south of the center to Krčma Gaj, an old-style tavern among the pines. Start with a plate of pršut, cheese and kajmak, then try cicvara, a rich polenta cooked with kajmak and cheese until the fat runs, or lamb roasted under a sač, an iron lid covered in hot coals. If you'd rather stay on the square, Rujno on Kraljev trg calls itself the oldest restaurant on Zlatibor.

Start the day the way Užice does, with breakfast. Komplet lepinja is the dish of the town: a round loaf of bread, opened up, filled with kajmak and an egg and baked, then doused with hot pretop, the juices and fat from roasted meat. It's enormous and rich, and locals insist it's eaten with your fingers, never with a knife and fork, with a glass of yogurt. It once fed shepherds and laborers for a whole day.

The classic place to eat it is Šuljaga, an old bakery on Petra Ćelovića street. A komplet costs a few euros, and it will keep you going until the evening.

Užice sits in a deep bend of the Đetinja river, and above the river stand the walls of its 14th-century fortress, reached by a short climb from the old town. Below the cliff is the small hydroelectric plant Pod gradom, built in 1900, one of the first in Europe to run on Nikola Tesla's alternating current and still producing power today.

In autumn 1941 Užice was the capital of the Republic of Užice, a territory held by the Partisans for about two months, Tito's first. In the vaults of the National Bank they ran the only arms factory working in occupied Europe, until it blew up on 22 November 1941. A week later the Germans retook the town, and a Partisan battalion died covering the retreat at Kadinjača, 14 km west, where a large memorial now stands. From 1946 to 1992 the town was called Titovo Užice. The National Museum tells the story, and on 9 October 2026 it opens a new permanent exhibition on the heritage of the region.

The Gold Gondola, opened in January 2021, is billed as the longest panoramic gondola in the world, about 9 km from the center of town to the summit of Tornik. The ride takes 25 minutes, and it's the best way to understand what Zlatibor looks like: meadows, pine woods, villages and the dark water of Ribničko Lake slide past below, and on clear days you can see into Bosnia and Montenegro.

At 1,496 m, Tornik is the highest peak of Zlatibor and its ski resort, with a six-seat chairlift and snowmaking for the winter season. In summer the chairlift, a rail bob and mountain bike trails keep it busy, but after the summer season the lifts stop, and the gondola, or a drive of about 35 minutes, is the way up. In winter the same hill is the ski area (see Skiing on Tornik under more time).

Walk the short paths around the top station for the view, which is the widest on the plateau, then head back down in time to stop at the lake.

On the way down, get off at the middle station by Ribničko Lake, a reservoir created in 1971 by damming the Crni Rzav river. It's quiet, green and dark blue, with a path along the shore, and a good place for a short walk before you catch a later cabin back to town. Your return ticket lets you get on and off at the middle station.

Mačkat, 13 km from town, is the capital of Zlatibor pršut. Dozens of small producers here salt legs and loins of beef and pork, then smoke and dry them over beech wood for around two months. The rule, as the locals put it, is salt and nothing else; the cold, dry air of the plateau does the rest. Zlatibor beef pršut is a protected product, deep red, lean and gently smoky, and it's completely different from Italian prosciutto.

Drying needs frost, so the smokehouses are busiest from late autumn to spring; the rest of the year you buy last season's stock. Many houses have signs outside and sell straight from the house. Knock, ask to taste, and buy a vacuum-packed piece for the road, along with stelja, smoked mutton, and the region's dry sausage. In early February the village holds the Pršutijada, a fair where producers compete for the best pršut.

Stopića is one of the most impressive caves in Serbia, mostly because of its entrance, a huge mouth about 18 m high and up to 40 m wide in the side of a gorge. Inside, a stream has built a staircase of travertine pools (bigrene kade), some of them several meters deep, and a walkway takes you through several halls past them.

It's cool inside all year, so bring a sweater. A marked path takes you through, and the visit takes about an hour.

On a hillside in Sirogojno, about fifty log houses, barns, granaries and workshops from around Zlatibor have been rebuilt to show how families lived here in the 19th century. Staro selo, the Old Village, is the only open-air museum of its kind in Serbia, and you walk from house to house, with the hearth, the beds and the tools all in place. Across the road is the church of Sts. Peter and Paul, with an iconostasis painted in 1764 by Simeon Lazović.

Sirogojno is also the village of the sweater. In the 1960s Dobrila Smiljanić organized the women of Zlatibor into a knitting cooperative, and by 1991 around 2,500 knitters were making hand-knitted Sirogojno sweaters, shown in Paris, Rome and Moscow. The museum tells their story, and the shop still sells their work.

Gostilje is a village at the bottom of a valley where a stream drops about 20 m over a ledge into a pool, then runs on through a string of smaller cascades. A path leads down past all of them. The falls are at their fullest in spring and early summer; by September and October the flow is much thinner.

Have a late lunch at the restaurant by the falls, where the specialty is trout from the stream's fishponds, grilled or fried, with kajmak, cornbread (proja) and a salad.

Back in town, Zlatibor's nights are spent in kafanas with live music, mostly around Kraljev trg. Order a šljivovica, the plum brandy that this part of Serbia takes very seriously (there's even a village called Šljivovica, which holds a Rakijada every September), a mixed grill and a srpska salad of tomatoes, cucumbers and onions. Most bands play on Fridays and Saturdays.

If you're here at the end of July, don't miss the Sabor trubača, a weekend of brass bands on Kraljev trg, a smaller cousin of the famous festival at Guča.

From 1925 to 1974 a narrow-gauge railway ran from Belgrade to Sarajevo, and to get over the Šargan pass between Mokra Gora and Šargan Vitasi, the engineers made it climb the mountainside in a loop shaped like a figure eight. The line was closed in 1974, and the Šargan Eight was rebuilt as a heritage railway in the early 2000s: 15.5 km, 22 tunnels, 5 bridges and a climb of 300 m.

A diesel engine pulls restored old carriages up through the tunnels and over the bridges, and from the top you look down on the track you've just come up. The train stops at stations with viewpoints on the way, and the round trip takes about two and a half hours.

On a hill above the station, the film director Emir Kusturica built a whole wooden village, Drvengrad or Küstendorf, for his film Life Is a Miracle (2004). He liked it so much he stayed: there are log houses, a church, a cinema, a restaurant and streets named after his heroes, from Che Guevara to Ivo Andrić and Diego Maradona. It's half film set, half theme park, and every January it hosts Kusturica's Küstendorf film festival. Have lunch at the restaurant before you leave. Višegrad, with its UNESCO-listed Ottoman bridge over the Drina, is 30 km further on, across the border in Bosnia, if you'd rather swap Tara for it.

Drive north into Tara National Park, a block of dense forest where brown bears still live, to Mitrovac. From there a gravel road of about 6 km, which you can drive, leads to the start of a short path to Banjska stena, a rocky platform hanging over the Drina canyon. Below you, the green river winds between Serbia and Bosnia, and Perućac lake fills the canyon floor. It's one of the most photographed views in Serbia.

Drive back to Zlatibor (about 1.5 hours) for a slow dinner. This is the evening for meat under the sač or a pljeskavica from the grill with kajmak on top, a srpska salad, and ajvar, the roasted red pepper relish that families here still make by the jar every autumn. If it's cold, ask for sarma, cabbage rolls slow-cooked with smoked meat.

The Uvac river loops through a limestone canyon in a series of tight meanders, so tight that the water nearly doubles back on itself, and the whole valley is the Uvac Special Nature Reserve. It's also home to the largest colony of griffon vultures in Serbia, around 500 birds with wingspans of nearly three meters, brought back from near extinction in the 1990s. You'll see them circling over the cliffs.

The boat takes you along the lake that fills the canyon to the Ice Cave (Ledena pećina), part of one of the longest cave systems in Serbia, which you visit on foot, and on some tours up to a viewpoint over the meanders. Book a day or two ahead with the reserve (weekdays, 8am-4pm) or a local boat operator.

Sjenica sits on the Pešter plateau, a high, bare grassland more than 1,000 m up, and it regularly records the coldest temperatures in Serbia. The people here have kept sheep for centuries, and sjenički sir, Sjenica cheese, is one of Serbia's protected foods: a white, salty cheese ripened in brine, softer and creamier than feta, made from cow's or sheep's milk. The lamb from the plateau is just as famous.

Have a late lunch of roast lamb or sjenička pita, a pie made of thin pastry, then buy cheese at one of the town's dairy shops to take home. The town is mostly Bosniak, with a mosque at its center, and it's a glimpse of the Sandžak region that runs on to Novi Pazar.

On the way back, stop in Nova Varoš, the small town at the foot of Zlatar mountain. Zlatar has its own protected cheese, zlatarski sir, a soft, full-fat cheese from cow's milk. Look over Zlatar lake from the road above the town, then drive the last hour back to Zlatibor.

For the last night, order a big meze in one of the kafanas on Kraljev trg: a board of everything you've tasted this week, pršut, stelja, young and old kajmak, Sjenica and Zlatar cheese, proja, pickled peppers and a slice of gibanica, the cheese pie made in every Serbian home, all with a glass of šljivovica, or borovnjača, a sweet liqueur of the wild blueberries that grow all over the plateau.