Kravica is a waterfall in Herzegovina, in the south of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it is broad rather than tall. Some twenty cascades fan out in a horseshoe 120 metres wide, dropping about 25 metres over a wall of pale tufa into a green pool that people swim in. This is dry limestone country, where rivers come out of the rock and sink back into it a few kilometres later. The Trebižat is one of the few that stays on the surface long enough to fall, and Kravica is where it does it. What the water falls over is its own work: the river carries dissolved lime, and where it spills across moss and roots the lime sets into porous stone, so the wall keeps thickening. Beside the cascades a small grotto hangs with stalactites of the same lime, dripping instead of spilling. In March and April, fed by rain and snowmelt, the river runs four or five times its summer volume, the horseshoe comes down as one sheet and the spray reaches you from metres back.
By June it has calmed, and that is when people get in. The pool opens out cool green below the falls. You wade in from the shallow, pebbled edge toward the deeper middle, where the water stays cold even in August. Small rowboats and kayaks go out onto the lower water and paddle up to the foot of the cascades. The wall towers overhead there, and the noise and the pull of the current replace the busy terrace behind you. To take in all twenty ribbons you step back to where the semicircle opens whole, best in the early morning before the sun climbs and the buses come in from Mostar and Međugorje. It was never only a swimming hole. This was one of the few places in a karst country where a herd could be walked down to drink, and the falls are named for a cow that went over the edge here and lived.