Ljubljana's best loops: where the locals ride from the capital

Ljubljana sits at 299 m in a basin with a marsh to the south, a river plain to the north and hills on three sides, and the honest thing to say about it as a cycling base is that the riding is good rather than spectacular: a lot of 300–800 m climbs on quiet lanes, one proper mountain, and a flat loop for every day you do not feel like climbing. The Alps are an hour and a half away and covered elsewhere. This is about what you can ride from the door, using the loops the Ljubljana tourist board publishes and the ones the locals actually ride, with the numbers from the board rather than from a head unit.

Flat: the Barje and the river

The Ljubljana Marshes. South of the city is the Ljubljansko barje, a flat, open wetland laced with lanes and drainage ditches. The tourist board's Little Barje Circuit is 46.5 km with 280 m of climbing — it grades it "hard", which is a stretch unless the wind is up, and on the Barje the wind is often up because there is nothing to stop it. It is where the city's riders do their recovery spins and their winter miles, and it is the best flat riding in the country: quiet lanes, a horizon, Krim in front of you the whole way round. If you are new to getting out of a city by bike, the Barje is the easy exit — south along the Ljubljanica and you are in the fields inside twenty minutes.

North to Kamnik and Zbilje. The board's Ljubljana–Kamnik route is 30.5 km with 170 m, and Ljubljana–Zbilje Lake is 18 km with 130 m. Both are flat plain riding towards the Kamnik–Savinja Alps, on a mix of cycle paths and village roads, and both are the way to the harder climbs in that direction.

Short and steep: Šmarna gora and Rašica

Šmarna gora is the hill on the northern edge of the city that every Ljubljana resident has walked up: 669 m, with the western summit, Grmada, seven metres higher, and fifteen waymarked paths to the top. There is no road to the summit — it is a walking hill — but the ring of lanes round its base through Tacen, Šmartno and Vikrče is a standard evening loop, and the short climbs on the north side towards Skaručna are the sort of thing you use for short intervals when the flat gets dull.

Rašica, at 641 m just north of Šmarna gora, is the board's suggested mountain-bike loop — 16 km with 360 m from the city — and there is a road up the back of it that is steep enough to be worth doing on a road bike. Short, sharp, and half an hour from the centre.

The Polhov Gradec hills

West of the city the ground rises into the Polhograjsko hribovje, the Polhov Gradec hills, which the tourist board calls easily accessible and describes as offering hiking, trail running and cycling. The highest point is Tošč at 1,021 m — its neighbour Pasja ravan at 1,020 m used to be higher until the army lowered it by eight metres in the 1970s — and the hills are a maze of small roads between them. The tourist board's Polhov Gradec page gives Gora at 824 m above the village and the castle hill Kalvarija at 460 m; the village itself, with its 17th-century mansion, is the usual coffee stop.

The riding here is what Ljubljana does best. None of the climbs is long — 300 to 500 m of gain is typical — but they are steep, quiet and close together, and you can string four or five into a 70 km day without seeing a main road. The roads over Katarina (Topol) and down to Polhov Gradec, and the long lane up the Gradaščica valley beyond it, are the two lines every local knows. This is also the wettest corner of the basin: ARSO's normals for Topol pri Medvodah, at 660 m in these hills, show 1,649 mm of rain a year against Ljubljana's 1,362 mm, and 178 cm of fresh snow in an average winter against 86 cm in the city, so the hills are white when the Barje is merely grey.

Janče: the city's own climb

East of the city, Janče is the highest point in the municipality of Ljubljana at 792 m, and the board's Ljubljana–Janče–Ljubljana route is the reference loop: 45 km with 820 m of climbing, graded hard, out through the Sava valley villages and up through orchards to the top. The final kilometres are steep, the descent is quick, and it is the climb Ljubljana riders use to find out where their form is in March. In our experience the loop takes a fit rider a little over two hours; the board's timing is more generous.

Krim: the mountain

Krim is the 1,107 m mountain on the south edge of the Barje, the trig point from which Slovenia was first surveyed in the 1810s and the hill that mountain-guide writer Rudolf Badjura called the "Ljubljana Olympus". The tourist board's big route, Golovec, Krim and the Lake below Krim, is 71.3 km with 1,250 m: over Golovec on the city's edge, across the Barje to Ig and Iška vas, up Krim — around 800 m of gain over 15 km in the board's description — down through Rakitna and back past Podpeč lake. The board is straightforward that the route follows macadam as well as asphalt with some sections on cart tracks, so it is a gravel-bike route in full; road riders take the tarmac up from Iška vas or from Rakitna and skip the rough bits. Either way it is the one full-day climb you can do from the city without a car.

The weather in the basin

ARSO's 1981–2010 normals for Ljubljana Bežigrad give a July mean daily maximum of 27.3 °C, 1,974 hours of sunshine and 153 days with measurable rain a year — spread evenly through the year, with June the wettest month at 144 mm. Snow lies on 50 mornings, 15 of them in January. The summer is warm rather than hot, and afternoon storms are common; the winter is grey. The one thing the tables do not measure and every rider here will tell you about is the basin fog, which sits over the city and the Barje for days at a time in winter when the hills above are in sunshine. That is our observation, not ARSO's, but it is why the winter loops go up rather than out: 400 m of climbing takes you out of the fog more often than not.

If you are here in winter, winter route design is worth reading before you plan on the Barje, and the hills to the west will be salted and gritted on the main lines only.

Getting further

Ljubljana is the centre of the rail network and, in our experience, the trains take bikes without fuss: Bled and Bohinj in about an hour, the Karst in about the same, Kamnik in half an hour. The loops here are what you ride on the days you do not use them. For everything else, the country-wide overview covers where to go and when, and multimodal rides covers using the train as the first leg.

Any of these loops can be saved in Moveee — the Route Engine will show you the profile before you commit — and ridden in Moveee Indoor on the fog days, which in a Ljubljana January is a genuine use case rather than a marketing line.

The short version

• Recovery or wind training: the Barje, 46.5 km flat.
• An hour after work: round Šmarna gora, or up Rašica.
• The best half-day: the Polhov Gradec hills via Katarina, 60–80 km, steep and quiet.
• The form test: Janče, 45 km, 820 m.
• The big one: Krim, 71 km, 1,250 m, gravel bike or pick the tarmac lines.