Lake Ohrid has held water for more than a million years, which makes it one of the oldest lakes on Earth and a refuge for creatures that live nowhere else. That long isolation bred more than 200 endemic species — the Ohrid trout, freshwater sponges and snails found only here — earning it the name a museum of living fossils. Straddling the border of North Macedonia and Albania, it drops to 288 metres and is fed by underground springs that filter through the karst of Mount Galičica from higher Lake Prespa, arriving so clean you can see down as far as 22 metres. In 1979 it was inscribed as a UNESCO natural World Heritage Site, and a year later the medieval town on its shore was added as a cultural one — one of only a handful of places to hold both at once.
The lake's emblem is the Church of St. John at Kaneo, a 13th-century stone chapel on a bluff where the water falls away on three sides, its silhouette against the blue among the most photographed sights in the country. Behind it climbs the old town of Ohrid, white houses and red roofs that by legend once held a church for every day of the year — 365 in all — giving it the old name Jerusalem of the Balkans. Come early and the water lies glass-still, reed beds mirroring the sky as fishermen push out in narrow wooden boats. In summer the shallows warm enough to swim in, clear to the pebbles below, and boats run south to the spring-fed monastery of Saint Naum near the Albanian line. Development and pollution have since drawn repeated UNESCO warnings, a reminder that a place a million years in the making can still be lost.