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A brief exploration of Slovenia:
Slovenia is so small that you can drive from the Alps to the Adriatic in a few hours and it has so many places to go, it seems an escape to stay in a rented cottage is more than a box-ticking exercise. Most people who take this sort of break start with Lake Bled. The island church, the castle on the cliff, the cream cake that every local has an opinion on. But staying in a villa around Bled but a little further out in the Bohinj valley gives you the lake without the coach parties. You hear the mist on the water at six in the morning when the only other person awake is the man launching his fishing boat. Luxury options here are modern glass and timber houses with saunas and infinity pools that look wrong in the photos but fit very well into the pine forests. The budget cottages are often older and slightly creaky farm buildings with the owner left you a bottle of schnapps in the fridge and a note that hot water takes four minutes to warm up. Both have their charms, and both draw you close to a landscape that is borrowed from a fairy tale. If mountains aren’t your thing, the Soča Valley draws a totally different crowd. Kobarid and Bovec sit in a landscape so violently green it looks edited. This is where you go if you want to kayak or hike or just sit on a terrace and watch the river change from milky turquoise to deep jade depending on the light. The villas here are stone houses that have been in families for generations, rented out now, because the grandchildren live in Ljubljana and the maintenance is too much for the grandparents. You will pay more for a place with direct river access than something up a steep track, where you need decent tyres and a bit of nerve. The food is robust. Gnocchi with local cheese, air-dried ham that doesn’t taste like anything in the packet and wine from the Goriška Brda hills just over the border that tastes like someone actually cared while making it. The cuisine here feels more Italian than Eastern Europe, which is understandable if you look at a map, but it still comes as a surprise on the table. Then there is the coast. Piran, Izola, Koper. It is not the Croatian riviera, and thank goodness for that. The villas and apartments here are tighter and often housed in Venetian-era buildings with staircases built for people who were shorter in the sixteenth century. Luxury means a rooftop terrace with a view of the salt pans and a bathroom where you can actually turn around. Budget means a cottage inland, where you drive ten minutes to the beach but pay half the price and eat fish that was swimming that morning. The cuisine changes here. More olive oil, more seafood, more Italy in the DNA of the dishes. You find yourself eating grilled sardines with your fingers at a plastic table by the harbour, which feels exactly right. Ljubljana is worth mentioning because some of the best cottage holidays are not in the capital but orbiting it. Twenty minutes out and you are in wine country or forest. You’re able to spend a morning in the busy old town, walking up the Dragon Bridge, drinking coffee by the river, where the atmosphere is distinctly Central European, then go home to a cottage near Škofja Loka or Polhov Gradec hills by late afternoon. The contrast is the point. A market full of white asparagus and hand-made pottery on one side and a hammock on the other and woodpeckers and tractor traffic on the other side. The people you meet stick with you. And there is the humble neighbour who comes and brings you firewood because he saw the pile was low and does not comment beyond a nod. There is the woman at the local shop who insists you are buying the wrong cheese for the region and physically swaps it for you at the till. And there is the young waiter in Bovec who learned English from watching Peaky Blinders and sounds faintly threatening when he is actually being helpful. And then there is Franc, or at least that is what we called him, the pool man who kept the pool at a place we spent a few nights near Sežana. He came every morning at half past seven, wearing flip flops and a suit jacket over swimming trunks, and a net and transistor radio with Slovenian folk music playing at an almost deaf-sounding level. He spoke no English but communicated entirely through thumbs up, thumbs down and dramatic facial expressions. A thumbs down meant the pH balance was off. A thumbs up with a wink meant we could swim. He once spent twenty minutes trying to explain, through mime, that a hedgehog had fallen in overnight and he had saved it using a frying pan. We think it was a frying pan. It might have been a dustpan. And either way he was devastated when we left and gave us a bag of lemons from his own tree and we went home and made gin and tonics for a month. But those quiet moments are what stay with you. Sitting outside as the light dims, the temperature dropping fast because you are at altitude, and you’re wrapped in a sweater with a glass of Teran wine. You realise how much noise your daily life is. No emails, no traffic, just the occasional cowbell from a field you cannot see. Then you go to dinner and the noise is there again, in cafes, in cups and plates and in the energy of people living in a place rather than passing through it. You need both, I think. The silence to remember who you are without a title, and the bustle to remind you that the world is still turning, still interesting and still full of strangers who could end up in your story I have to tell later. A few days is never enough, honestly. But it is enough to reset something. You return home with lemon juice on your fingers, a slightly stiff neck from an unfamiliar pillow and a memory of a man in a suit jacket fishing a hedgehog out of a pool. That is the Slovenia that stays with you. Not the postcards, but the mornings when you made coffee in a kitchen that was not yours, looked out at a view you did not earn, and briefly felt perfectly, perfectly, somewhere else.
Have a great vacation in Slovenia from the EUCottages travel team
