Tunnel of Love (Klevan)

ForestsRivne Oblastı,Ukraine

A working freight line in northwestern Ukraine whose trees have been trimmed by the passing wagons into a green arch matching their width and height.

September·Edge of season

Jul–Sep

The vault stays fully closed and green, but past its fresh best — leaves dry and yellow toward late summer, mosquitoes thicken in the still air, and by late September the first branches begin to turn.

Year-round The rails, the arched trunks and the roughly three-a-day freight are here every day; the leaf canopy that makes it a tunnel grows in spring, thins in autumn and is gone by winter.

The Tunnel of Love at Klevan is a stretch of working freight railway in the Rivne oblast of northwestern Ukraine whose trees have been trimmed by the passing wagons into a green arch matching their width and height, a corridor of leaves three kilometres long between the village and a fibreboard factory, and it is walked along the rails between the three trains a day, best in June, when the canopy is densest, and again in October, when it turns copper. The line was laid through a plantation of trees that grew over it, and the wagons, brushing the branches on both sides three times a day, keep the arch shaved to their own shape, so that for a few hundred metres near the middle the branches meet overhead with no sky showing at all and the light on the rails goes green; guides will say Soviet planners planted the trees to hide military trains from aircraft, a Cold War story nobody can prove, and the promise that a couple walking through hand in hand will get their wish sounds like old village folklore but is younger than the photographs that made the place famous online around 2011. The train inches through at walking pace, and the walkers stand clear against the leaves. By mid-October the green has gone over to gold and rust, fallen leaves bury the sleepers and the rails run as two dark lines through colour, thinning week by week until by November it is a bare railway again, and from May the trees knit shut over the rails into the continuous vault that is densest through June. Nothing protects the tunnel, since it exists only as long as the factory keeps sending its trains and the branches keep being cut, and the war has closed the region to most visitors. Klevan itself has a ruined castle, and Rivne is half an hour away. The Tunnel of Love is a railway that a factory keeps green, and the train is the gardener.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The freight still runs, and the leaves swallow the sound of it — three trains a day come through slowly; step off the ballast and check both directions before you set up a shot.
Do not judge the tunnel at the entrance — the first stretch is patchy and open, and the section that closes into a true vault begins several hundred metres along the track.
Come in mid-April and you will walk a bare railway — the canopy needs a few weeks after leaf-burst to knit shut, and the arch only reads as solid from May onward.
Early on a weekday is the whole trick — wedding shoots and photographers fill the corridor at weekends, and flat morning light running straight down the rails is what makes the picture.
Wear boots you don't mind ruining — the ground between the sleepers holds water, and after rain the trackbed churns into mud for long stretches.

Things to do

1
Find the stretch where the arch closes completely
For a few hundred metres near the middle the branches meet overhead with no sky showing at all, and the light on the rails goes green. This is where couples walk the sleepers hand in hand and make the wish the place is famous for.
2
Stand clear as the freight shaves the arch
Three times a day the working train inches through, filling the corridor it carved and brushing the branches on both sides. Watching it pass is the one moment the whole trick explains itself: the tunnel is simply the space this train has been cutting for decades.
3
Walk the corridor after it turns copper
By mid-October the green has gone over to gold and rust, and fallen leaves bury the sleepers so the rails run as two dark lines through colour. The arch thins as the weeks pass, letting more sky through — the same tunnel, coming apart.

Watch

Nearby

234 km