Goriška Brda: cycling the wine hills on the Italian border

Goriška Brda is the corner of Slovenia that pushes furthest west into Italy: a block of hills between the Soča river and the Italian Collio, covered in vines, cherries and olives, and threaded by lanes that go over every ridge rather than round it. The Slovenian Tourist Board counts some 280 km of cycling routes across it, which for an area you can cross in under an hour tells you how dense the road network is.

It is not a mountain destination and does not pretend to be. It is a place for rolling days where you climb 1,000 m without ever seeing a climb longer than four kilometres, and where the Italian border is a line you cross a dozen times without noticing. Here is how to ride it, when to go, and the one ascent that is worth planning a day around.

The shape of the riding

Brda is a series of parallel ridges running roughly north-east to south-west, with villages sitting on the crests: Šmartno, Kojsko, Gonjače, Medana, Vipolže and Dobrovo among them. The roads follow the ridges and dip between them, so any loop that links three or four villages is a sequence of descents and 1–3 km climbs at gradients that are steep for their length. There is almost no flat.

• Šmartno is the hub. It is a walled village, first mentioned in 1317, that was turned into a fortress against Ottoman raids in the first half of the sixteenth century and stayed a frontier fort until the mid-eighteenth. It sits on the ridge with roads leaving in four directions, and the Brda tourist office is here.
• The Gonjače lookout tower, a few minutes' ride from Šmartno, is 23 m tall and, according to the tourist board, gives a view that takes in Brda, the Julian and Carnic Alps, the Dolomites, Friuli, the Gulf of Trieste, the Karst, the Vipava valley and the Trnovo forest. That list is the geography lesson: from one tower you can see every region we have written about in this series. It is the obvious place to start a ride and to work out where the weather is coming from.
• Dobrovo in the south has the castle and, in the tourist board's words, the largest wine cellar in the country. The lower villages towards the Italian border at Vipolže and Medana are gentler and the lanes there are the flattest riding in Brda.

The Italian side is the same landscape with a different name, the Collio, and since Schengen the crossing points are just lanes. A loop that goes out through Dobrovo into Italy, along the ridge past Cormons and back in over the hills to Šmartno is the classic Brda day. Carry ID; there are no checks but the roads are international.

Sabotin: the one real climb

Sabotin is the bare ridge that closes Brda off to the east, above the Soča and the Solkan bridge. It was a First World War front line, and the summit is now the Sabotin Peace Park with a network of military passages and caverns cut by the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies that you can walk through. It is the one place in Brda where the road goes up for long enough to feel like an ascent.

The Peace Park lists three road approaches: from Nova Gorica via Solkan, Podsabotin, Kojsko and Gonjače; from the Soča valley via Plave and Vrhovlje; and from Brda via Dobrovo, Šmartno and Gonjače. It also warns that the road Google Maps suggests via Podsabotin past the Bregar farm is unpaved and unsuitable for motor vehicles — on a road bike, follow the signed Kojsko–Gonjače approach. The park says the mountain and the neighbouring Sveta Gora and Škabrijel are "great for cyclists", and they are, in the sense that they are quiet and steep. The summit is a little over 600 m by our reckoning; official pages do not publish an altitude, so treat that as approximate. From the Soča at Solkan it is a climb of roughly 500 m, and the upper section on the Peace Park road is exposed, hot in summer and open to wind from every direction.

On the way, the Solkan bridge is worth a look from the road: the Slovenian Tourist Board describes the railway bridge over the Soča here as having the longest stone arch in the world.

The weather, from inside Brda

ARSO runs a climate station at Vedrijan, on the ridge between Šmartno and Kojsko at 241 m, which means the numbers below are for Brda itself rather than a valley floor somewhere nearby.

Two things stand out. The first is that Brda is warm for its latitude — a January mean of 4.3 °C and a mean daily minimum that stays above freezing — because the ridges sit above the valley cold pools and face the sea. It is a genuine year-round region and one of the few places in Slovenia where a February ride is normal. The second is the rain: 1,540 mm a year is a lot, more than Ljubljana, and it is concentrated in autumn. October and November are the months to avoid, and if you do come then, riding in the rain is worth reading first because the lanes here carry mud off the vineyards.

The best months, in our experience, are April and May, when the cherry orchards flower and then fruit and the roads are dry, and late September into October, during the harvest, when the light is low and the temperatures are perfect. July's mean daily maximum of 27.9 °C is manageable, but the ridge roads have little shade.

Wind

Brda is on the edge of burja country. The bora that hammers the Vipava valley to the south-east reaches Brda weakened and from the north-east, and the ridges give partial shelter, but on a burja day Sabotin and the Gonjače ridge are exposed. Check gusts, not mean speed, before a Sabotin day; our guide to wind forecasts explains the difference. The traffic information service publishes a four-level burja scale for the expressways, starting at gusts of 80–100 km/h; if any level is in force on the H4 through the Vipava valley, stay on the western side of Brda that day.

A practical loop

Start at Šmartno. Ride up to the Gonjače tower for the view and the weather check, drop north-east towards Kojsko and follow the signed road up to Sabotin and the Peace Park. Descend the same way, then cross Brda south through Dobrovo and Vipolže, over the border into the Collio, and return along the Italian ridge to re-enter near Medana and climb back to Šmartno. It is roughly 60 km with something over 1,200 m of climbing, all on asphalt, and it contains every kind of road Brda has.

You can save it in Moveee's route builder and, if you are coming out of a northern winter, ride it in Moveee Indoor first so the rhythm of the short ridge climbs is familiar. For the country as a whole, start with our guide to cycling in Slovenia; Brda is about 15 km from Nova Gorica, which has the railway station and is the easiest way in without a car.

The short version: Brda is not for people who want a pass. It is for people who want to ride 80 km through vineyards on lanes with no traffic, climb a little more than they expected, and finish in a walled village at a table. It does that better than almost anywhere.