A picturesque shepherd village, high up on Slovenia's Velika Planina plateau

Austria was our next destination. After shipping off Saroja and re-packing the car we started another northward leg in our trip. Matt had seen some postcard-worthy photos of a crazy little shepherd's village high on the Velika Planina plateau - a good four+ hour side trip, but it looked like a fairly neat goodbye to Slovenia.

Another gondola ride up to the 1,667 summit of Velika Planina opened up vast meadows with cows like some Swiss chocolate advert, fantastic wooden shepherd cottages and views across the Kamnik-Savinja Alps. Velika Planina is Slovenia’s largest alpine meadow, and is made up of several alpine meadows spread out over a high Karst plateau. We joined a bunch of other tourists, all rubber-necking the idyllic, working herdsman's settlement and their unique oval-shaped wooden cottages. 

German invaders torched most of the original cottages during the second World War, something that the young man at the 'museum' repeated on at least three occasions (seems they're still a bit sore about that!). Apart from the museum, all the other cottages were restored in a (very slightly) 'modernised' manner but still preserved much of the external architecture of the originals (although with the recent addition of solar panels in many cases).

We were lucky in our timing as the village only comes to life when herdsmen bring their cattle up between June to September, tending to them in the little enclosures around each cottage. According to our friendly museum chap, each shepherd was permitted to graze between one and six cows on the plateau each year - and this right is passed down between generations, so if your family started with the right to only graze one cow four hundred years ago, then that's still all you could graze today!