Mostar Old Bridge Trail

About this pack

A 5-day mid-range trip to Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, taking in Stari Most bridge, Vrelo Bune spring, Kravica Waterfalls and Blagaj Fortress.

Inside the Mostar Old Bridge Trail trip

Mostar Old Bridge Trail centres on Stari Most, the Old Bridge that gives Mostar its name — the city's mostari were the bridge keepers who guarded the crossing under Ottoman rule. Commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1557 and designed by Mimar Hayruddin, a student of the great Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan, the single-arch stone bridge took nine years to build, replacing an earlier wooden suspension bridge the Ottoman geographer Katip Çelebi described as swaying so badly that people crossed "in mortal fear." The finished bridge spans the Neretva River from a height of 24 metres, protected by the Halebija and Tara towers on either bank, and during the Croat–Bosniak War it was destroyed by shelling on 9 November 1993 after being used as a military supply line — a demolition the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia later ruled had targeted a legitimate military objective. Rebuilt using the same techniques and Tenelia limestone as the original, with stones recovered from the riverbed by Hungarian army divers, the bridge reopened on 23 July 2004, and it remains the stage each summer for the traditional diving competition in which local divers leap from its parapet into the cold Neretva below, a custom formalised into an annual contest since 1968 and, since 2015, a stop on the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series.

From the bridge the route continues southeast to Vrelo Bune, the spring of the Buna River near the village-town of Blagaj, ranked among the largest karst springs in Europe and discharging around 30 cubic metres of water a second from a cavern beneath a sheer cliff. Beside the spring stands the Blagaj Tekke, a Sufi lodge whose guesthouse and mausoleum are built directly into the cliff face and rock overhangs; the guesthouse predates 1664, with a documented reconstruction in 1851, and the whole ensemble likely took shape not long after Ottoman rule reached Herzegovina around 1520. Nearby, watermills built along the Buna's banks once powered stamping and fulling operations for wool and cloth, and two Ottoman-era bridges, the Karađoz-beg and Leho bridges, still cross the river in the town.

The route then reaches Kravica Waterfall, a broad tufa cascade on the Trebižat River about 40 kilometres south of Mostar, where water drops roughly 25 metres into a lake some 120 metres across. A popular swimming and picnic spot through the summer, the falls are at their fullest in spring, when meltwater swells the Trebižat and the surrounding karst landscape turns green; nearby, a small grotto lined with calcium-carbonate stalactites sits beside an old mill, and the falls themselves once belonged to Zaim-beg Selimić, a municipal councillor and landowner from the nearby town of Ljubuški.

The trail closes at Blagaj Fortress, known locally as Stjepan-grad and, in classical times, as Bona, a fortified hilltop complex above Blagaj at an elevation of 310 metres, some 266 metres above the source of the Buna. Archaeological remains on the site's three summits point to occupation from prehistoric and Roman times, and the earliest written reference to the fort appears in the tenth-century "Treatise on Peoples" by the Byzantine emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, who names it, alongside a companion fort, as Bona. Built on a naturally flat site above vertical cliffs on three sides, the fortress is reached by a steep serpentine path some 900 metres long leading to a fortified gatehouse, its walls rising 12 to 14 metres and still largely intact — a defensible last stop after a rebuilt Ottoman bridge, a cliffside Sufi spring and a tufa waterfall.

• Stari Most — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Vrelo Bune — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Kravica (waterfall) — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Blagaj Fortress — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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