Biogradska Gora is one of the last uncut forests in Europe, beech and fir leaning over a glacial lake in the Bjelasica mountains of northern Montenegro. No saw has touched it since 1878, when the people of the region handed the woodland to Prince Nikola and he ordered it guarded. Only two other old-growth stands of this size are left on the continent. What uncut means is visible as soon as you are under it. Trees here have stood for four or five hundred years, the canopy closes almost fifty metres overhead, and nothing that falls is taken away. That standing and fallen deadwood is the reason rare woodpeckers work these trunks, tapping at wood no tidy forest would still have. The biggest silver fir ever measured in Europe grew here too, a tree called Doria, 59.7 metres tall with a trunk 7.1 metres around, found in 2018 and down by 2019.
Lake Biograd lies at 1,094 metres in the middle of all this, the largest of five lakes the Ice Age glaciers scooped out of these mountains and dammed with their own rubble. Wooden rowboats wait at a small dock, and out from the shore the forested slopes and the snow-streaked ridges of Bjelasica come back at you off deep green water. An easy path takes you right round the shoreline in under two hours, weaving between mossy trunks with the lake flashing through the trees nearly all the way. Brown bears, wolves and lynx live in these woods and keep well out of sight, so what you actually notice is birds: some 150 kinds, golden eagles turning over the ridges. Longer trails climb out of the trees onto the open ridges of Bjelasica, past smaller glacial lakes to views across the range, with snow patches holding on into early summer. The lake itself is only about twelve metres deep. Streams keep feeding sediment into it and the shore trees keep closing in, so the forest will have the water too, in the end.