Rugova Canyon is twenty-five kilometres of limestone gorge in the Accursed Mountains of western Kosovo, above the city of Pejë, with walls up to a kilometre high, nine caves strung along the cliff face and a turquoise river below the one road that threads it through tunnels cut into the rock, and it is driven, walked in the snow, climbed on a cabled route through the caves and crossed on a zipline of 640 metres. The Lumbardhi i Pejës river cut the gorge through limestone that is hollowed from the inside as well as from above, since the rock dissolves in rainwater, so the walls are pitted with caves and springs that break straight out of the cliff in the snowmelt; the road burrows through short tunnels, ducks under overhangs and pops out onto ledges with the river far below the guardrail, and the Patriarchate of Peć stands where the canyon opens, the seat of the Serbian church built in the thirteenth century at the gate, because for centuries whoever held that gate held the road into the mountains, its churches frescoed and its nuns still in residence. The Shpellat route, bolted in 2020, links the nine caves on rungs and cables, climbing to around 900 metres with the gorge opening below.
The zipline runs from wall to wall up to sixty metres above the ground at speeds that touch eighty kilometres an hour, and trails leave the canyon to switchback up to small glacial lakes on the plateaus beneath the peaks, Liqenat above the village of Kuqishtë the best known, on the Peaks of the Balkans trail that crosses into Montenegro and Albania. From mid-October the beech belt on the lower slopes turns gold and rust against the grey walls above, and when the snow settles the road is plowed to a single lane and the gorge goes quiet between white cliffs, with the ski resort of Bogë at its top. Rugova is a canyon with a road down its throat, and the caves in its walls are climbed now.