Slovenský Raj, the Slovak Paradise, is a national park in eastern Slovakia that is climbed rather than walked: its gorges are so tight and so steep that the only way up them is by iron ladders, chains and footbridges bolted to the rock beside the waterfalls. The park is a limestone plateau cut by a dozen ravines, and until about 1900 the deepest of them were thought impassable; the ladders came in the early twentieth century, and the routes are now one-way, up only, so that nobody meets on a rung. Suchá Belá is the famous one, a gorge where long iron ladders climb beside the Misové waterfalls, hauling yourself up rung by rung as the cascades roar past a metre away and the walls close to a few metres apart, with the spray on your hands, and it takes about two hours to reach the plateau. Prielom Hornádu is the other classic, the longest canyon in Slovakia, followed along the Hornád river on a path that clings to the cliff by narrow footbridges and steps cut into the rock, with the water green below.
The easy day is Tomášovský výhľad, a flat rock terrace jutting over the Hornád valley, reached by a short walk and the most popular lookout in the park, with the canyon far below and the forest to the horizon. On the park's edge lies the Dobšiná Ice Cave, holding a permanent underground glacier, ice up to 26 metres thick and around 110,000 cubic metres of it, among the largest ice caves in Europe and lit by electricity as early as 1887. The warm karst meadows scattered between the gorges hold the densest concentration of butterflies anywhere in Slovakia, more than 2,000 species recorded across the park, and in summer they rise from the grass in clouds. The villages around the park, Podlesok and Čingov, are the bases, with campsites and wooden cottages. Slovenský Raj is a park where the trail goes up a waterfall, and the ladders are the trail.