Lovely Ljubljana

I’m writing this on Nov. 11 – Armistice Day, here in Europe – from Nîmes, France.  The end of our journey is less than a month away, and I would be remiss if we didn’t write something about Ljubljana, because it was such a pleasant surprise.

When we decided to go to Ljubljana when didn’t even know how to pronounce it. We’re still not sure, but “loob-lee-yana” seems to be accepted (I think you can also say “loo-blana;” apparently the Slavic pronunciation of “lj” is tricky for non-native speakers). We put Ljubljana on the itinerary more for its geographic position than anything; we have been working our way west from Sarajevo passing through northern Italy and southern France.  I didn’t know that Ljubljana was the capital of Slovenia until I started consulting the travel websites about what to do there.

FYI: Ljubljana has a population 280,000 (534K in the metro area) and sits in the mountainous geographic center of Slovenia. Slovenia, by the way, is tucked in there next to Italy and south of Austria just above Croatia. Slovene is the official language, the Euro is the currency, and Roman Catholicism is the majority religion.

I say that Ljubljana was pleasantly surprising, because we had just spent a week in Zagreb (capital of Croatia), which was…gritty. Not that we didn’t appreciate Zagreb’s own charms, but it was a very urban city – concrete, graffiti, and traffic. Ljubljana, on the other hand has lots of pedestrian space, which follows the Ljubljanica river through the middle of town that lets pedestrians stroll around without being on guard. It’s very relaxing.

There’s a very large park that you can almost get lost in. The buildings are only a few stories high, and the architecture is mostly wedding cake Habsburgian punctuated by the sort-of-but-not-totally Art Nouveau of architect Jože Plečnik. The fine arts museum had a few interesting pieces. With a large outdoor market and a few butchers in the inside colonnaded market, we ate well. We had a few surprisingly good beers that were surprisingly cheap (€3.90 for 0.5L) and served with a light snack. We spent most of our time just walking around, because Ljubljana is good for pedestrians that way, and the weather was unbeatable, so we got to see a fair amount of the city. Like a lot of European cities, Ljubljana is populated with a lot of bakeries filled with tasty treats that we rationalized consuming…some how. Meghan, however, will tell you the greatest thing about Ljubljana are the dragons keeping watch over the city on the Dragon Bridge.

The flip of Ljubljana’s coziness is that there’s really not much there in terms of marquis tourist attractions. We are fortunate in that we have the time to pop into a city and not expect much. If, however, you have two weeks of vacation a year and haven’t seen the big, touristy European cities yet, I don’t know that I can recommend Ljubljana as your next destination. But if just walking around a smallish, charming town with a few surprises is your thing, you’ll really enjoy it.

Some Structures Designed by Slovenian Architect Jože Plečnik

Charming Ljubljana