Biogradska Gora National Park is one of the last uncut forests in Europe, 1,600 hectares of beech, fir and spruce in the Bjelasica mountains of northern Montenegro, near Kolašin, leaning over a glacial lake, and it has stood untouched since 1878, when the people of the region gave it to Prince Nikola as a gift and he ordered it guarded. The forest is old growth, trees up to five hundred years old and sixty metres tall with the dead ones left where they fall, and it held the tallest and thickest silver fir ever measured in Europe, a giant called Doria, possibly the largest forest tree on the continent by volume; it is part of the UNESCO listing that gathers more than ninety fragments of ancient beech forest across eighteen countries into one site. Lake Biograd at its heart is the largest of five glacial lakes in these mountains, scooped out by Ice Age glaciers and held by the rubble they left as they melted, at 1,094 metres, and an easy path loops the full shoreline in under two hours, weaving between mossy old-growth trunks with the water visible through the trees almost the whole way, while wooden rowboats wait at a small dock to be taken out across the mirror-still water.
Brown bears, wolves and lynx still live in the forest, left undisturbed for centuries, but the big animals keep out of sight, and what is seen is the golden eagle over the ridges and the deer at dusk. Trails beyond the lake climb out of the trees onto the open ridges of the Bjelasica massif, passing smaller glacial lakes on the way to viewpoints over the whole range, and the katuns, the summer huts of the shepherds, stand in the meadows above the treeline, some serving cheese and kajmak to walkers. The park is minutes off the main road between Podgorica and the north, with a campsite by the lake, and in autumn the beeches turn the slopes copper. Biogradska Gora is a forest a prince was told to keep, and it has been kept.