Eight days in Slovenia: a country you can cross before lunch

Arrive and walk. The Triple Bridge is where the city gathers: the central span dates from 1842 and the two flanking footbridges were added in the 1930s by Joze Plecnik, the architect whose name will come up repeatedly over the next three days. He came home from Vienna and Prague in 1921 and spent thirty five years redesigning his own city, from the bridges to the embankments to the lamp posts.

Cross into the old town, which is two long baroque squares running under the castle hill, with lanes climbing off to the right and a fountain outside the town hall. Spend an hour getting lost in it.

Then go up. The funicular takes a minute from the bottom of the old town, or the walk through the woods takes twenty. There has been a fortification here since the twelfth century and the tower at the top gives you the Kamnik Alps, the plain to the south and the red roofs directly below. Time it for the last of the light.

Dinner in the old town, and a drink somewhere on the water afterwards.

The market runs along the right bank in the morning, with a covered hall of cheese and cured meat behind it and Plecnik's long curved colonnade above the water holding it all together. Go before noon and note that Sunday is the one day it does not happen.

Eat standing up afterwards: Carniolan sausage and a bowl of soup from a counter, ordered from a machine, for a fraction of the price of a restaurant.

In the afternoon walk twenty minutes south to the architect's own house. Plecnik lived here from 1921 until his death in 1957 in a round brick tower he built onto a suburban cottage, and the rooms are still full of his furniture, drawings and plaster models. Entry is by timed tour, it takes an hour, and it makes sense of everything you have walked over.

Then, after dark, the other Ljubljana. Metelkova is a Yugoslav army barracks squatted in 1993 as the bulldozers arrived, now covered in mosaic and scrap sculpture, with a dozen bars and clubs in the old blocks. It is five minutes from the station, harmless, and completely unlike the rest of this very tidy city.

West of the centre the city stops abruptly at a park. Tivoli runs up a wooded hill with a chestnut promenade, a pond and photographic exhibitions hung along the main avenue, and it is where the whole city walks.

The mansion halfway up holds the museum of contemporary history, and it is the single best explanation of this country you will find: a walk-through First World War trench, the years between the wars, occupation and partisan resistance, four decades of Yugoslavia, and then the declaration of independence in 1991 and the ten days of fighting that followed, which is as close as Slovenia came to the wars that took its neighbours apart.

In the afternoon, the national gallery on the edge of the park: Slovenian painting from the Gothic to the impressionists, plus the original of the baroque fountain that stood in the old town until the weather got at it.

Then the riverbank for the last evening, because tomorrow you are in the mountains.

Buses leave for Bled hourly from beside the railway station and take about 75 minutes, dropping you a few minutes from the water. Go in the morning: you want the afternoon.

Walk the lake first. It is six kilometres on a flat path, about an hour and a quarter with stops, and it is the only way to understand the geography, with the island in the middle, the castle on the cliff and the Julian Alps stacked up behind.

Then take a pletna out to the island. The boat is a flat-bottomed wooden thing rowed standing up, the fare is fixed and cash only, and it buys you the crossing and half an hour ashore. The church on the island is baroque, finished in 1698 over much older foundations, with a bell that arrived in the earlier Gothic building in 1534 and which everybody rings for a wish, so the sound carries over the water all day. There are ninety nine steps up from the dock and a local tradition about grooms carrying brides up them.

Finish at the castle on its crag, twenty minutes up on foot, where the estate was given to the bishops of Brixen by the emperor Henry II in 1011. What you walk around is mostly seventeenth century, and the terrace has the view that put this lake on every poster in the country.

Be at Vintgar for the first slot. The gorge is four kilometres north of Bled, a narrow cut where the Radovna runs green over rock, crossed and recrossed since the 1890s by wooden galleries bolted to the cliff. It is a kilometre and a half each way, it ends at a waterfall, and it is now ticketed with timed entry, so book the day before in summer and take the earliest slot for the light and the quiet.

Then go into the mountains. Buses run from Bled into the Bohinj valley in about forty minutes, and the lake at the end of it is the largest in Slovenia, four kilometres long and completely enclosed by the Julian Alps. No island, no castle, no coach parties: cold clear water, a pebble shore and a thirteenth century church by the stone bridge at the near end.

Swim, hire a paddleboard, or walk the northern shore path. Then take the cable car up from the southern shore, five minutes to a meadow at 1,537 metres with the whole lake below and the three heads of Triglav to the north. Slovenia's national mountain is 2,864 metres and sits on the flag.

Get the last bus back, or stay for dinner in the valley and take a taxi.

The bus to Piran goes back through Ljubljana and takes most of the morning, about four hours in total. There is no railway to Piran; the nearest station is at Koper, a short bus ride up the coast.

You arrive in a town that looks Italian because it effectively is. Start on the main square, which is not really a square: boats moored here until the basin silted up in the nineteenth century, and the town paved it over in white stone, which is why it is a lazy oval. The statue in the middle is Giuseppe Tartini, born on the corner in 1692 and the composer of a violin sonata he claimed the devil played to him in a dream.

Climb from there. Every lane off the north side goes up and they all arrive at the terrace in front of St George's: red roofs falling away to the point, the harbour on one side, and on a clear day the whole gulf as far as the Dolomites. The church is early sixteenth century, and the campanile beside it copies the one on St Mark's Square almost exactly.

Keep going for the walls, which run along the ridge with four watchtowers on them and steps that no modern authority would permit. Go in the last hour of light, then come down for fish one street back from the water.

Go inland for the day. An hour northeast of the coast the limestone plateau of the Karst begins, and the Reka river, having run on the surface for fifty kilometres, drops into a hole in the ground and keeps going.

The tour walks through eleven chambers and then out onto a ledge above a gorge so large that the path across it is a metal footbridge hanging 45 metres above the river, which is audible long before you see it. Photography is not allowed inside, which turns out to be a mercy. It is 12 degrees down there all year, the walk is a couple of kilometres with steps, and you come out by funicular.

Getting there without a car takes planning: bus to Koper, train to Divaca, then a shuttle or a half hour walk. If the connections defeat you, this is the one thing on this coast worth hiring a car for a day to reach.

Back in Piran, walk the cliff path north out of town in the late afternoon. It runs a kilometre to a small bay at Fiesa, and the rock ledges along the way are where the town swims once the visitors have gone in for dinner.

One museum before you go, and it is the one that explains the town. The maritime collection occupies a palace on the harbour front and covers what Piran actually did for a living: salt, shipbuilding, seafaring and the Austro-Hungarian navy, with ship models, charts and a room of votive paintings left by sailors who came through storms.

Then get in the sea, because it is the last thing you will want when you are home. The ledges below the western wall get the morning sun and are usually empty before ten.

Coffee on the marble oval afterwards, and a bag of the coarse salt from the pans down the coast, which have been worked by hand since the Middle Ages and are the reason this town was ever rich.