The Karst by bike: Lipica, Štanjel and the stone villages

The Kras — the limestone plateau between the Vipava valley and Trieste that gave the world the word "karst" — is where Slovenian cyclists go when the Alps are shut. It is rolling rather than mountainous, the lanes are empty, the villages are built of the stone they stand on, and the sun shines for 2,251 hours a year at Tomaj in the middle of it, nearly 300 hours more than Ljubljana. It is also the home of the burja, a wind that closes roads. Here is how to ride it: the two official loops, the two places to aim for, and how to read the one forecast that matters.

What the Karst is like to ride

Nothing on the plateau is high — Tomaj is at 320 m, Štanjel's hill a little higher, and the ridges along the Italian border only a few hundred metres above them — but nothing is flat either. Every lane climbs out of a doline and drops into the next, so a loop that looks gentle on the map accumulates 800–1,000 m of climbing in 70–80 km, on gradients that rarely hurt and never last. It is tempo terrain: a place to ride steadily for three hours without ever hitting a climb that forces the pace, which makes it the best winter base-miles country in Slovenia and one of the best in Europe. The surface is mostly good asphalt, the traffic on the lanes is close to nil, and the drystone walls on both sides mean that when the wind blows you get some shelter from it, which matters here.

The landscape is oak and pine on red soil, walled fields, vineyards of Teran, and villages that turn their backs on the north-east. Read the roof tiles held down with rocks and the front doors on the lee side and you understand the wind before you have felt it.

The Karst Cultural Ring: 81 km on asphalt

The regional tourist board's road loop is the Karst Cultural Ring: 81 km, 830 m of climbing, on asphalt throughout, graded for a "medium high" level of fitness and recommended for trekking or road bikes. It runs Sežana – Lipica – Lokev – Divača – Križ – Avber – Ponikve – Kobdilj – Štanjel – Tomačevica – Škrbina – Sveto – Komen – Gorjansko – Pliskovica – Dutovlje – Tomaj and back to Sežana, which is to say it strings the plateau's villages together in one anticlockwise sweep. The board's own selling points are cultural — Fabiani's Štanjel and the Spacal gallery, the Černigoj gallery at Lipica, Srečko Kosovel's Sežana and Tomaj, the film-actors museum in Divača — and that is the right way to think of it: a day of riding punctuated by stone.

Ridden as published it is a four-hour day for a fit rider, in our experience, with the two climbs that register being the rise to Štanjel and the long drag back up onto the plateau from the Komen side. Start in Sežana, which has the railway station, and ride it so that Štanjel falls around lunch.

The Lower Karst Cycling Ring: 72 km, mixed surface

The board's second loop is the Lower Karst Cycling Ring: 72 km with 1,040 m of climbing, on asphalt and macadam, and it recommends a mountain bike for it. From Štanjel it goes west through Kobjeglava, Škrbina, Lipa and Temnica to the ridge along the Italian border — Trstelj and the Cerje peace memorial, from where you can see the sea — then down through the villages of the lower plateau, the Brestovica valley, Gorjansko, Pliskovica and back. It is the wilder of the two, with First World War monuments on the ridge and the Debela griža hillfort, one of the largest prehistoric hillforts in the country, on the way. On a gravel bike it is a very good day; on a road bike the macadam sections are rough enough to be a nuisance rather than a danger, and you can pick your way round most of them on parallel lanes.

If you have to choose one, choose by bike: the Cultural Ring on a road bike, the Lower ring on anything wider. Choosing between gravel and road covers the trade-off in general terms.

Lipica

The stud farm at Lipica, just outside Sežana on the Italian border, was established in 1580 and is, by the board's account, the biggest Lipizzan stud on earth, with a herd of more than 300 horses on an estate of avenues, paddocks and oak woodland. It has walking, running and cycle trails through the grounds, and the road past it is part of the Cultural Ring. The white horses in the fields are one of the few things in the Karst that look exactly as advertised. It is also, on a hot day, the shadiest kilometre on the plateau.

Štanjel

Štanjel is the village on the hill that appears on every cover: built on the terraces of Turn hill, one of the oldest settlements in the Karst, with Roman remains, a first written mention in 1402 and defensive walls from the 15th century built against the Ottoman raids. Its modern shape is the work of Maks Fabiani, the architect who was its mayor in the early twentieth century and who laid out the Ferrari garden and villa on the slope below the castle — the board calls the garden the most important piece of park landscaping in Slovenia from between the wars. The castle now houses galleries and the visitor centre. Ride up through the arch, walk the last part, and leave the bike by the church with the lemon-shaped tower.

The other stone worth stopping for is the ordinary kind. The plateau's drystone walls — built without mortar from the stone cleared off the fields, dividing pastures and lining the lanes — were inscribed on UNESCO's list of intangible heritage in 2018 as a craft, and about 400 corbelled stone shepherds' huts survive on the classic Karst. They are why the lanes feel the way they do.

The burja

The burja is a cold north-easterly that pours off the plateau edge towards the Adriatic. The Vipava valley tourist board, which lives with it on the windward side, puts gusts at over 200 km/h with an unofficial record of 235 km/h, and says it is a winter wind that is "not unusual in other seasons". It is not a strong breeze. It is a wind that bans caravans from the roads, and the national traffic centre runs a dedicated wind-measuring system for it with four restriction stages, from stage 1 at 80–100 km/h to stage 4 above 150 km/h, that trigger vehicle bans on the exposed sections.

The rule for a cyclist is simple: if the traffic centre's burja page shows any restriction stage in force, do not ride the Karst that day, and if the forecast has a north-easterly at more than about 50 km/h in the gusts, ride somewhere else. The drystone walls help on the lanes; they do nothing on the open ridges or on the descents towards the Vipava valley, where the wind hits you side-on. Check gust speed and direction, not mean speed — reading a wind forecast properly explains why the distinction matters — and remember that the burja can be blowing on the plateau while Ljubljana is calm.

When to go: the winter argument

ARSO's 1981–2010 normals for Tomaj, at 320 m in the middle of the plateau, are the case for the Karst in the months the Alps are closed. The mean daily maximum in January is 6.7 °C, the temperature fails to rise above freezing on only two days a year, snow lies on six mornings, and the sun shines for 119 hours in January against 71 in Ljubljana. Annual rainfall is 1,377 mm, with July the driest month at 82 mm and the autumn the wettest. In summer the July mean daily maximum is 27.4 °C and the plateau has little shade, so the season is inverted: the Karst is at its best from October to April, and on a still day in February it is the best riding in the country.

The caveat is the wind, which is most frequent in exactly those months. A Karst winter week needs a plan B for the burja days — the country overview suggests the coast, which is sheltered from it in places, and on the worst days there is no shame in saving the Cultural Ring in Moveee and riding it in Moveee Indoor from wherever you are staying.

Practical

• Base: Sežana (railway station, start of the Cultural Ring) or Štanjel (prettier, quieter, no station).
• Getting there: Ljubljana–Sežana by train with the bike; Trieste is a short ride across the border for anyone arriving from Italy.
• Water: the villages have fountains and the plateau has no rivers. Fill up in Komen and Dutovlje.
• Food: Karst prosciutto and Teran are what the region is known for, and the osmica farm-cellars sell both. We will not name one; ask in Tomaj.
• The forecast: gusts and direction, the night before and the morning of. Then the traffic centre's burja page.