Today Montenegro.com takes you to a part of the country we have not had the chance to present so far. Piva sits in the north-west, along the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it is the emptiest, steepest and in some ways the strangest corner of Montenegro: a high limestone plateau cut apart by rivers, with a turquoise reservoir lying in the bottom of one of the gorges and a road that spends more time inside the rock than outside it.
A region made of canyons
The whole area is recognisable for its untouched nature, dense forests and the canyons of the Tara, the Piva, the Komarnica and the Sušica, which are unlike anything else in Europe. Each has its own character, but they share an origin: all four were cut by river erosion into the same soft-looking, hard-wearing karst, over millions of years, while the plateau around them was slowly lifted.
The most famous is the Tara canyon, known worldwide for its rafting. It runs for some 78 kilometres and reaches depths of up to 1,300 metres. Measured by length, depth and its other characteristics, the Tara canyon is the second largest in the world after the canyon of the Colorado River in the United States, and the deepest in Europe by a wide margin. The Piva canyon beside it is shorter but scarcely less dramatic, with walls rising well over a thousand metres above the water.
The lake, and the dam that made it
What most visitors photograph is not a natural lake. Piva Lake was created in the 1970s when the Mratinje dam, one of the tallest in Europe at around 220 metres, closed off the Piva canyon and backed the water up for more than forty kilometres. The result is a long, narrow, intensely green-blue body of water lying between vertical walls, with side arms running into tributary gorges.
The road along the eastern shore is the reason many people drive here at all. It was blasted into the cliff face above the new waterline and passes through dozens of short, unlit tunnels, opening again and again onto the lake several hundred metres below. It is slow going, single lane in places, and worth every minute.
Plužine and the life of the plateau
The area of Piva is sparsely populated, and the largest settlement is the small town of Plužine, itself rebuilt above the new shoreline after the old town was flooded. Villages are strung thinly across the plateau, many of them half-empty outside the summer months, and the katuns, the seasonal shepherds' huts on the high pastures, still fill up when the flocks come up in June.
This area is also known for exceptionally good medicinal herbs and teas, and for local agricultural products of high quality produced to genuinely high ecological standards. Piva cheese, made from the milk of animals grazed on the plateau and matured in skin or in brine, is the one to ask for; honey, dried meat and wild mountain tea come a close second.
The monastery that was moved
The most important cultural and historical monument here is the Piva Monastery. Construction began in 1573 and lasted until 1586, and it was built by the Metropolitan of Herzegovina and later Patriarch of Peć, Savatije. The monastery holds an unusually rich treasury and for centuries was the most significant spiritual and cultural centre of the region.
It is also the only monastery anywhere to have been taken apart and rebuilt in full. The reservoir would have drowned it, so between 1970 and 1982 the church was dismantled block by block and moved some three and a half kilometres uphill, its sixteenth-century frescoes detached from the walls, transported and reset in the same positions. Stand inside and the joins are effectively invisible.
Rafting, canyoning and getting around
Most rafting trips on the Tara start or end at Šćepan Polje, at the confluence of the Tara and the Piva where the Drina begins, right on the Bosnian border. The classic descent runs through the deepest section of the gorge; the main season is roughly May to September, and the water is cold whatever the air temperature. On the Komarnica, the Nevidio canyon is one of the last canyons in Europe to be explored, first traversed in 1965, and is passable only in high summer when the flow drops and only with licensed guides.
Piva is reached from Nikšić by the road north to Plužine, and from Žabljak and the Durmitor massif by a mountain route that is spectacular in summer and closed or difficult after heavy snow. Come between late May and early October if you want the roads clear and the high pastures open.
