Some mountains you cross and some mountains you happily get lost in, and Tara is one of the latter. This national park in western Serbia, on the Bosnian border, is a vast plateau of fir, beech and pine forests that drop sheer into one of the most beautiful canyons in Europe: that of the Drina River. From the Banjska Stena viewpoint, more than a thousand metres up, the Drina winds far below, forming the emerald-green Lake Perućac, with the mountains of Bosnia in the background. It is one of the most striking natural views in the whole of the Balkans.
But Tara is not just scenery. It is the last refuge of a living fossil: the Serbian spruce (Pančićeva omorika), a tall, slender conifer that the botanist Josif Pančić discovered here in 1875 and that survived the ice ages in these ravines. It is also brown bear country, a land of hidden monasteries like Rača, mountain lakes like Zaovine and that image that went around the world: the Drina River House, a tiny wooden cabin perched on a rock in the middle of the river, near Bajina Bašta.
This guide covers the essentials and practicalities of Tara: how to get there without a train from Belgrade, what the Drina boat trip and tours cost, which viewpoints not to miss, where to stay on the mountain and how to combine it with Mokra Gora and Zlatibor. A tip: Tara is best enjoyed with a car and no rush, leaving time to walk among the firs and sit facing the canyon as the evening falls.
Tara's history is, above all, that of its nature and of the people who lived in the shadow of the border. For centuries these mountains of western Serbia, above the Drina, were home to shepherds, woodcutters and monks: in a fold of the forest, Rača Monastery — founded in the 13th century by King Dragutin Nemanjić — became a renowned centre of scribes, where monks saved medieval manuscripts during the Ottoman occupation. In 1875 the botanist Josif Pančić identified the Serbian spruce (omorika) here, an endemic conifer and ice-age relic that made the mountain world-famous among naturalists. The 20th century brought the construction of the Drina and Bajina Bašta dams, which created lakes Perućac and Zaovine, and in 1981 the declaration of Tara National Park to protect its forests, its bears and its unique spruce. Nearby, on the river, the Drina River House became famous in 2011, a wooden cabin that turned Tara into a photographic icon. The full history, with names and dates, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The mountains of the west, heart of rural and patriotic Serbia: cradle of the resistance and land of medieval monasteries like Studenica, canyons, forests and traditions that have endured for centuries.
Read the history of The west (Zlatibor, Tara, Mokra Gora) →They depart from Mokra Gora, 15 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Tara's story begins long before humans arrived, deep in geological time. These mountains in western Serbia are a massif of limestone and forest that drops sheer into the Drina River, on the border with Bosnia, forming one of the deepest and most beautiful canyons in the Balkans. During the ice ages, when glaciers swept across much of Europe, Tara's sheltered gorges served as a refuge for species that died out elsewhere.
That is why botanists see Tara as a sanctuary. The Serbian spruce, Pančićeva omorika, survives here: a very tall, slender conifer with an almost column-like silhouette, a true relic of the Tertiary period. In 1875 the great Serbian naturalist Josif Pančić identified and described it for the first time in these very forests, giving it the scientific name Picea omorika. The discovery made the mountain famous among scientists across Europe: a living fossil believed lost, holding out in hiding on the cliffs of the Drina.
Alongside the endemic spruce, Tara is home to dense forests of beech, silver fir and pine, mountain meadows, and rich wildlife that includes brown bears, wolves, deer and many birds of prey. It is one of Serbia's most valuable ecosystems, and centuries later that natural wealth would be the reason it was protected. Before there were national parks, though, these mountains were for generations the land of shepherds, woodcutters, border smugglers and, above all, monks.
In a bend of the forest, beside the small river that gives it its name, stands Rača Monastery, the great spiritual and historical heart of Tara. Tradition links it to the Nemanjić dynasty and credits its founding to King Stefan Dragutin in the late 13th century, at the height of the medieval Serbian state. Like so many monasteries in the region, it was later left at the mercy of the turbulent times that came with the arrival of the Ottomans.
It was in fact under Ottoman rule that Rača reached its greatest glory. In the 16th and 17th centuries the monastery became one of the most important centres for copying manuscripts in the whole Serbian world: the famous 'Rača school' (Račanska prepisivačka škola). In its scriptoria, generations of monks copied by hand and illuminated liturgical books, gospels and chronicles, preserving the language, faith and memory of a people who had lost their state. Copyists such as Hristifor Račanin, Kiprijan Račanin and Jerotej Račanin made their own names in the history of Serbian culture.
When wars and Ottoman reprisals grew worse, many of these monks fled north, crossing the Danube and the Sava into the lands of the Habsburg monarchy. They took their books and learning with them, and helped lay the foundations of Serbian literary culture in Vojvodina. Rača was destroyed and rebuilt several times over the centuries. The restored complex you can visit today is still a place of silence and pilgrimage, and a reminder of how, in the worst of times, the written word was saved in the forests of Tara.
For centuries the Drina was a wild, free river, famous for its rapids, its log rafts and the stories of the raftsmen (splavari) who floated timber down from the mountains. That wild river became immortal in Serbian and Bosnian literature, above all in the work of Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić, who made the Drina the symbolic axis of the border between worlds.
The 20th century transformed that landscape. As part of socialist Yugoslavia's industrialisation, large hydroelectric dams were built on the Drina and its tributaries. The Bajina Bašta power plant, opened in the 1960s, dammed the river and created Lake Perućac, the tongue of green water hemmed into the canyon that is now one of Tara's postcard views. Higher up the mountain, the Bajina Bašta pumped-storage plant gave rise to Lake Zaovine, a high-altitude reservoir among the forests. The wild rivers were tamed and turned into sheets of still water to produce electricity.
These projects changed life in the area: they brought jobs, roads and tourism, but they also flooded valleys, villages and farmland. Over time the artificial lakes blended into the landscape, and today they are an inseparable part of Tara's appeal: people sail, fish and swim in them as if they had always been there. The Drina canyon, with its now-still water and sheer walls, is still the region's great natural spectacle, best seen from viewpoints such as Banjska Stena, perched more than a thousand metres above the lake.
Awareness of how unique these forests are grew steadily over the 20th century. The endemic, endangered Serbian spruce, the old-growth beech and fir forests, the brown bears and birds of prey, the untouched canyons: everything marked Tara out as one of Serbia's natural treasures. In 1981 the Yugoslav state officially declared Tara National Park, with the aim of protecting this exceptional biological heritage.
Today the park covers a large area of the Tara plateau and the Drina canyon, with different protection zones. Its symbol is, naturally, Pančić's omorika, whose outline appears on the park's logo. It also protects areas of virgin forest, brown bear populations (this is one of the few places in Serbia where the bears survive in stable numbers), dozens of bird species and a very rich flora with many Balkan endemics. Management combines strict conservation of the most fragile areas with nature tourism on the Mitrovac plateau and at the viewpoints.
That commitment to protecting the land without closing it off made Tara one of Serbia's top ecotourism destinations. Waymarked trails were laid out, viewpoints such as Banjska Stena were set up, visitor centres and botanical gardens opened, and activities such as rafting on the Drina, mountain biking and boat trips through the canyon took off. The mountain that Pančić had made famous among scientists now opened up to travellers without losing its wild character.
In 1968 a group of young people swimming in the Drina near Bajina Bašta decided to build a small wooden platform on a lone rock sticking out in the middle of the river, somewhere to sunbathe and rest. That idea gave rise to the Kućica na Drini, the 'House on the Drina': a tiny plank cabin perched on the rock, surrounded by water on every side. The jealous river swept it away several times in floods, and each time the locals stubbornly rebuilt it in the same spot.
For decades it was just a local curiosity, loved by the people of Bajina Bašta. Everything changed in 2012, when National Geographic published a photo of the lonely little house in the middle of the Drina. The image went round the world, went viral and turned that stubborn cabin into one of Serbia's visual symbols. Today thousands of travellers come to photograph it from the bank, and its story, a house the river knocks down and people rebuild again and again, has become a small parable about stubbornness and beauty.
Tara today is that mix of monumental nature and poetic details. It's a national park where Pančić's fossil spruce, bears hidden in the forest, the sheer Drina canyon, emerald lakes, medieval monasteries of copyists and a toy-sized little house that refuses to give up all live side by side. Every autumn, when the beech trees blaze gold and red, and every summer, when boats head up the canyon, Tara shows why so many Serbs consider it the most beautiful mountain in their country: a place where natural and human history are intertwined on the banks of the most literary river in the Balkans.
