Slovenský Raj, the Slovak Paradise, is a national park in eastern Slovakia that you climb rather than walk. Streams have cut its limestone plateau into gorges so tight that the walls close within arm's reach, and the way through them is upward, on iron ladders and chains bolted beside the waterfalls. Until about 1900 the deepest of these ravines were thought impassable. The first marked trail was cut in 1908, rungs went in at the Misové falls in 1959, and the ironwork now amounts to some 300 kilometres of ladders, chains and footbridges. Suchá Belá is the famous climb: roughly two hours of hauling yourself up beside the cascades with the spray landing on your hands. The routes run one way, uphill only, so nobody comes back down at you on a rung.
Prielom Hornádu is the gentler one, the longest canyon in Slovakia, followed along the river on a path that clings to the cliff by narrow footbridges and steps cut into the rock. It trades the adrenaline for long green reaches of water and the richest wildlife in the park, which is ninety percent forest and holds bears, lynx and wolves. The easy day out is Tomášovský výhľad, a flat rock terrace jutting over the Hornád valley, where climbers come up the cliff below the railing while walkers stand at the edge. On the park's border, Dobšiná Ice Cave keeps a permanent underground glacier, ice up to 26 metres thick, frozen all year a short walk from the summer forest. It was wired for electric light in 1887, the first cave in the old Kingdom of Hungary to have it. Between the gorges the warm karst meadows carry the densest butterflies in Slovakia. None of the hard part was here to begin with. Local volunteers raised the money through the 1970s to push the ladders and bridges further across the park, so every rung you pull on was bolted into the rock by somebody from the valley below.