Why go
Read this before deciding how much of the country to cover. Alpine conditions in the northwest differ from the sub-Mediterranean Littoral, while Slovene culture developed where Slavic, Germanic, Romance and Hungarian influences meet. Those contrasts provide a more useful starting point than treating Slovenia as a single mountain destination.
The full story
Forests, rivers and limestone landscapes connect much of Slovenia, but the country spans several distinct geographic worlds. The Dinaric landscape meets the Pannonian Plain, while the northwest belongs to the Alpine region. Beneath karst country, water also follows underground courses. These differences help explain the range of scenery within a relatively compact territory. Slovene is the country’s official language. Catholicism and Lutheranism both influenced its cultural identity, and its history reaches across Roman, Holy Roman and Habsburg rule. The twentieth century brought successive Yugoslav states, wartime occupation and, in June 1991, independence. Slovenia joined the European Union in 2004 and adopted the euro in 2007. These are successive layers of the country’s identity, alongside the older regional distinctions that remain useful when choosing places to visit.