Jajce, the Bosnian City Where a Waterfall Plunges into the Old Town

There are few cities in the world where you can sit at a café and watch a waterfall as tall as a seven-storey building crash into the heart of the old town. Jajce is one of them, and the incredible thing is that almost nobody knows it. The Pliva waterfall — 22 metres of white water plunging where the Pliva meets the Vrbas — has been the first thing travellers saw entering the city for centuries. Today it is still there, unchanged, with the medieval walls in the background and cafés perched on the edge of the precipice.

Capital of the medieval Bosnian kingdom

Jajce takes its name from the Slavic word for "egg": the hill on which the fortress was built has that rounded shape. But the history goes far beyond morphology: founded in the 14th century by Duke Hrvoje Vukčić Hrvatinić, Jajce became capital of the medieval Bosnian kingdom, and it was here in 1461 that Stjepan Tomašević was crowned, the last king of Bosnia before the Ottoman conquest. The Roman Temple of Mithras, carved into rock beneath the old town, testifies to even more ancient presences. In 1943, in this same city, the AVNOJ assembly — Tito's partisan resistance — proclaimed the foundations of the future socialist Yugoslavia.

The floating mills and the Pliva Lakes

A short distance from the waterfall, along the course of the Pliva, you find the floating mills of Jajce: 19th-century wooden structures that float on the water and still grind today. A few kilometres upstream, the Pliva Lakes — two emerald pools of water set among beech forests — offer swimming, canoeing and picnics far from any tourist crush. A pedal boat rents for five convertible marks per hour (about 2.50 euros).

How to get there, where to eat

Jajce is about 160 kilometres from Sarajevo and 90 from Banja Luka, reachable by regular bus. The old town is walkable in less than an hour. The restaurant by the waterfall serves grilled Pliva trout, the quintessential local dish, for about eight euros. April, May and September are the ideal months: the waterfall is in full flow and the heat is bearable.