This is a fantastic circular 2 hour hike to go find 2 of the largest of the 17 Disappearing Lakes of Pivka and a secret cave.. with the option to go find a few more of these fascinating lakes that appear in the winter, then disappear in the summer!

These 17 lakes are all interconnected by the river Pivka that flows through this enormous nature park and also disappears underground when nature decides!

And if you can keep your wig on with all this excitement.. how about this.. If you have visited Green Slovenia before then you have almost certainly never heard of this beautiful and unique nature park of the 17 disappearing Lakes, but equally you have almost certainly been to the Postojna cave and to the cute capital city of Ljubljana..

 

Well, the river that runs by Postojna cave is the same Pivka river AND part of the water that flows in the beautiful Ljubljanica river that flows through the centre of Ljubljana.. you guessed it.. comes from this Pivka river!

So once you have put your hair back in place you might be interested to go find a few of these sensational disappearing lakes and maybe have a bit of a hike by this amazing river in stunning Green nature?

We think these 17 Disappearing lakes are so special and unique.. You just don't have 17 connected disappearing lakes in Manchester or Madrid or Melbourne, but take a look at any brochure or internet guide you can find about the wonders of Green Slovenia and you will not find even a crumb of decent info about them.. 

 

They are one of the many Secret Green Places to Visit in Slovenia and we think if you knew a little bit more about them, you might like to explore, especially considering you will very probably be just a few km from them in your all too short holidays in Green Slovenia, visiting the Postojna cave or driving down to Croatia, for example..

So of course go see lake Bled in the middle of August and complain it is a bit busy, but how about the next day hiking around a few of these 17 Disappearing Lakes of Pivka in complete and lovely Green paradise isolation!!

And don't feel too bad at all that you know nothing about just one of the unique Slovenian Karst natural phenomenons where lakes fill dramatically and sometimes violently in the winter from the vast resources of natural water hidden under half of the country, possibly lasting for 7 months and later quickly disappearing to create massive paradise green meadows lush with flowers and wildlife.. and great for hiking!

 

We have noticed that even many locals are also oblivious to these wonders of nature hidden in plain sight all around them, but there is hope for these 17 Disappearing lakes of Pivka, cos there is a little museum tucked away just 20 mins from the Lodge which does a jolly good job of explaining all about these 17 Disappearing lakes.. how they work, appear and disappear, how to find them and some local legends too!

The Museum of the 17 Disappearing Lakes of Pivka..

In just two shakes of a dragon's tail from the main road in Pivka you can find this fantastc little museum with explanations in English for most exhibits and lots of maps of the lakes just outside the village of Petelinje..

 

But for now Slovenian tourism shoots itself in the foot yet again as there is NO main sign in English for the museum from the main road, NO sign in English to explain you are entering the Nature park of the 17 Disappearing Lakes of Pivka and even NO sign outside the museum in English to explain you have actually found the Museum of the 17 Disappearing Lakes of Pivka!!

All of those essential signs are just in Slovenian!!

This lack of understanding and appreciation that the rest of the world would be very interested in all these disappearing lakes if they only knew, is one of the main reasons we need to make such a fuss on this website and try to help visitors find and explore these natural wonders of nature!

 

We have written a blog about the 17 Disappearing Lakes of Pivka and another two about Hiking around the Petelinje Disappearing Lake and generally on the Petelinje Disappearing Lake which can actually be hiked to from this fantastic little micro museum..

Over the years we have taken great delight in discovering where all these 17 Disappearing lakes actually are and this inevitabubbly involves lots of hikes in Green nature!

So now we are gonna explain how to do another fantastic hike to discover 2 of the most unpronounceabubble of the 17 lakes AND a secret cave that looks like the entrance to Hell into the bargain..

 

 

Hike around the Big and Little Drskovce Disappearing Lakes..

Ok so the village to aim for is one we might never ever be able to say properly, but is called DRSKOVCE and the lakes are called the Velika (Big) Drskovce and the Malo (Little) Drskovce, so from now on we will simply call them the Big D and the Little D!!

(Often the the Disappearing lakes here are named after the village closest to them)..

There are two main roads leading down to Croatia from the little town of Pivka and the quieter one that leads towards PARJE is the one to take as it also goes through DRSKOVCE and this main road leads to pretty much ALL the 17 Disappearing Lakes of Pivka!

 

A few years ago now, determined to find all these lakes and bring some more easy hiking routes to your attention, we took the only paper map we could find for the lakes, (forget google it is useless for these lakes, but if you know Komoot it is excellent for the 17 lakes) and set out to find Little D and Big D..

It took us a couple of goes and some scrabbling around to find each lake, but this is often what we need to do first to create a route possible for visitors to try and find!

The other thing you need to know about Disappearing lakes is that they do tend to disappear and so if you rock up in the summer you can still find them, but they will be vast green paradises and empty.. same thing for the river Pivka, but it is easy to see where this river runs here even in summer as there is a big channel and bridge at the start of this walk..

 

So the main fun of this hike will be walking completely alone in a green paradise in forest on meadows and up hills, trying to discover these lakes and see where the water fills them so rapidly from the Karst underworld!

We took these photos on a late March day and hiked with our guide friend Paul, a Dutch biologist living in Slovenia, who knows so much about the animals and flowers and biology of the place!

He was able to explain so much extra about some of the flowers we saw and general stuff about these lakes that we learned a lot and it made our hike even more enjoyable..

 

Doing the Hike..

So arrive in DRSKOVKE, (from Pivka direction) which is a tiny village with a zebra crossing on the main road and turn left just before this crossing to go into the main village, (a few houses and a farm)..

There is very little obvious parking here, so we suggest you go through the little village centre and keep right, leaving the village, going down  past a farm onto a stone road, don't panic and then you will see the new Pivka river bridge.. Park just the other side of the bridge, but do not block the track for tractors..

We will start the hike from here and if you are lucky there will be some water flowing in the channel under the bridge, but do not forget the river is always flowing healthily below ground too!

We were very lucky today as the river was flowing beautifully under the bridge, so you will get to see photos here of the river and other parts of the lakes with water!

 

The idea now is to do a big anti clockwise circle taking about 2 hours and returning to the bridge, but we will explain at the end how you could do even more green stuff if you want!

So walk away from the river and bridge up the track and head off to the right when the track splits.. 

 

We are now going down to see the Big D lake! 

The path leads downhill a bit, which is a common feature for finding a disappearing lake as they are always the LOWEST points of the landscape where the underground water seeps up from..

And now for some excellent news, cos AT LAST there are a few signs on this route which will stop you scratching your head to be actually sure you have found one of the lakes and soon you will see that new sign for Big D!

 

The lake stretches off ahead in front of you as far as the eye can see to the forest line, but look to your right and you might be lucky enough to see two sinkholes, maybe muddy, but this is where the water will pour up out of to fill the lake.. when nature decides!

At spawning time, we have seen these little sinkholes teeming with frog's eggs and when you are standing here and looking out over the huge green meadow, you do get an appreciation that this indeed is a lake that has disappeared!

And if you are here when the lake is full of water and stand here, then you will get your feet wet!

 

We were quite lucky to see some deer galloping away in the distance at the far end of the lake and Paul had an ace camera to take this photo below.

He explained these were all female Red deer and we could see from the photo there were about a dozen of them!

We do not need to mention that you will not see this kinda sight walking around lake Bled with an ice cream stuffed in your mouth!!

 

Go back the way you came now to that main stone track and head up the hill a bit, before taking the FIRST left turn off this main track, (You could also just stay on the track which also takes you to Little D, but we prefer to take this side track then hike and scramble a bit down through the forest to the lake area)..

Once again you will encounter a vast flat green meadow area where the lake floods and we walked across this huge meadow to the other side where there is a cliff wall hidden behind some trees and we were very happy indeed to find quite bit of water here coming out of a cave and flowing out into the middle of this meadow along a stream flow!

 

We followed the water and already knew there was another cave at the other end of the lake area that is another "tap" for this lake.. So the water comes IN and OUT of the lake through that cave!

The cave was dry, but fascinating and sits at the base of a small cliff, so again, even without water, you can get a strong feeling of the shape of this lake!

 

Hike directly back now to the main path across the field and opposite to the cave and this new path will lead you uo and away from Little D lake and to another, bigger, secret cave!

Again we were so pleased to find a new sign to the cave, called Golobina (Doves) Cave and you get to walk on some wider farm tracks through grazing land littered with white Karst rocks.

The animals will always be fenced off and we saw two Lipizzaner horses in a field enjoying the mud!

 

Another handy sign will show you where to walk up and enter a field using plastic handles to open the electric gate.

You then walk up to the top of this field and you do not realise it but you are actually above the cave!

You also get a really fantastic view up here across to Nanos mountain and plenty of other Dinaric mountains..

But you also look down over that main road and the Pivka river flowing alongside.. In the summer, thousands of drivers will be using this road, just metres from this river and the cave you are just about to find, with absolutely no idea what they are missing as they rush down to Croatia as fast as they can!

But you know!

Go around the corner a little, following the track and there is even a new sign here too to guide you and you will come to the opening of one of the most spooky looking caves we have ever seen.. Golobina cave sure looks like an entrance to Hell!

 

We did mention there might be other stuff you can add on to this dayout and from up here with no leaves on the trees, we were able to make out the next village of Parje, (you have driven through it to get to Drsovsko) and we could also make out a small body of water behing the village through the currently leafless trees.

Well this is actually the Parsko Disappearing lake, another smaller lake and part of the 17 and we had NEVER seen this lake formed before or even found it!

We decided to visit the lake on the way back to the Lodge by car and walked down the hill to the Pivka river to complete our loop..

 

We had not fully intended to do this, but decided to try to follow the river line as close as possible cos we knew it would lead back to the bridge and our parking..

 But if you are here in mid summer and it all looks a bit too green and bushy, you could just go back over the hill the way you came back to the main path and there is a beautiful walk from there back to your car..

Even having said that, we would still urge you to try to follow the river!!

It was great fun and there are parts you have to scramble through and over a bit, maybe leave the river to climb up on some rocks as a little detour past the most dodgy bits, but keep to the river line where possible and you will quite soon pop out back by the main path and the see the bridge!

 

If we hadn't hugged the river we would not have found the bones of an eaten sheep or some flowers that interested Paul greatly, so it is always worth having a bit of a scramble in Green Slovenia so long as you always remember your way back to safety if the route does get completely blocked.. which can and does happen!

Of course in summer, you might even be able to walk ON the river itself, but like we said, be careful even if it looks dry as there could be some squidgy bits..

 

We reached our cars and the clock hit about two hours, so what a Green adventure this had been!

Extra Lake Tips..

So Big D and Little D are the 3rd and 4th or maybe 4th and 5th biggest of the 17 Disappearing Lakes of Pivka, but If you wanted to hike more from the bridge to go find a few more of the 17 lakes, then just follow the river line in the other direction away from the bridge and the path leads towards the next village (along the main road) of Zagorje and you will never guess the names of the two lakes near there.. oh, you did, yep Little Z and Big Z, or Malo Zagorsko and Velika Zagorsko!!

However there are even more of the lakes close to Zagorje and the stunning Kalc tower and even the source or "spring" of the Pivka river itself so we would suggest this would be the subject of another hike starting in Zagorje! (Which we still need to hike a few times and piece together the best route, including the castle, but this will be included as an E Bike route too)!

We did stop off at Parje on the way back.. It is the next village back towards Pivka and really close to Drskovce.

 

Even better there is a little local ice cream hut there, turn right off the main road and there is parking, where you can get fab locally produced gelato, so after a couple of scoops, continue down this side road along side the Pivka river for a bit and over the road bridge, (which the Pivka river goes under), then just a few hundred metres up, park and the Parsko lake that we spotted from the Golobino cave is down the hill on your left behind the trees!

The Parsko Disappearing lake is just a tiddler, but we were so grateful to see it here full of water and will return in the summer to find out where the water comes & goes from, but it looks like one of those lakes where the water seeps up from the centre, maybe from a sinkhole or from a cluster of tightly packed karst rocks?

You could even just stay parked in Parsko, by the way and walk directly here as it is not far!

 

What a couple of hours! If only some of those people whizzing through Green Slovenia as quick as they can would know there are so many beautiful hikes just outside the car window, they might stop for an ice cream, a bite to eat and maybe stretch their legs somewhere in this enormous Nature Park of the 17 Disappearing Lakes of Pivka!!

You can even E Bike here from the Lodge.. it is close enough, but we suspect our main E Biking route will be a drop off at Kalc Castle with the E Bikes and then guests can find the source of the Pivka river and explore some of the lakes on the epic ride back to the Lodge!

 

A last word about Guides..

We cannot tell you how much more of an amazing experience it was for us to go hiking with a local guide and we just do not understand why visitors to Slovenia seem to shy away from booking a guide to tour Green Paradise.

We do understand there are several factors.. Firstly you probably will not know what Green Wonders there are to explore here unless you find a few secret places on this website maybe and so many visitors schedule way too little time in Green Slovenia, especially if they think there is just a cave, a castle, a lake with a church on an island and a pretty capital city.. and you don't need a guide to explore those!

Also people might think that a guide will be very expensive, but would think nothing of paying a lot more to a guide to go Bear Watching here!

 

We were lucky enough to travel the world for a whole year in 2005 and so we really understand the value of going on local trips and taking local guides wherever possible on our adventures.

So all we can do now is highly recommend that you book a local guide in Green Slovenia and go explore some of the mysteries of the Karst. Who knows, it might be the best day of your hollibubbles here!

Paul has a website at Slovenia Nature Guide, if you want to get in touch with him and you can also phone the local TIC, (Tourist Info Centre) in the town near where you want to explore, cos they always have a list of English speaking guides..

Have a really great hike!