Rugova is twenty-five kilometres of limestone gorge in western Kosovo, with walls that stand up to a kilometre high, and the rock holding it up is full of holes. Limestone dissolves in rainwater, so this stone has been eaten out from the inside as well as cut from above. Springs burst straight out of the walls halfway up, whole streams disappear underground, and the largest cavern down there has stalactites, stalagmites and waterfalls of its own. The road through the gorge behaves the same way. It burrows through short unlit tunnels cut into the limestone and ducks under overhangs before popping out onto ledges with the river far below the guardrail. It is a slow, deliberate drive, one lane in places, blind hairpins, nowhere to look away. Where you can pull off high up, the river is a thin pale ribbon between walls that fall away from your feet.
After the first heavy snow the same road is ploughed to a single lane, and the whole gorge goes quiet between white cliffs. Nothing breaks it but the half-frozen river and the smoke of a few guesthouse chimneys higher up. Trails climb out of the canyon altogether, switchbacking to small glacial lakes on the plateaus beneath the Accursed Mountains. Liqenat, above the village of Kuqishtë, is the best known, cold and clear all summer inside a ring of pine and bare limestone. At the mouth of the gorge stands the Patriarchate of Peć, four churches in a single complex begun in the thirteenth century and finished in the 1330s, the seat of the Serbian patriarchs from 1346. For centuries whoever held that gate held the road into the mountains. And the holes in the wall are climbable. A route bolted in 2020 links nine caves strung along the cliff face, rungs and cables carrying you to around 900 metres with the gorge opening under your boots. It wants no climbing experience at all, only a head for the exposure.