Lake Bled: outside the park, but home to its administration
Why Lake Bled is not in the national park, and why Bled is still the usual starting point.
Bled lies at 501 metres in Upper Carniola (Gorenjska), and its lake at 475 metres: 2,120 metres long, 1,380 metres wide and up to 30.6 metres deep. The lake is not part of Triglav National Park. According to the park boundary in OpenStreetMap it lies about three kilometres outside; the protected area only begins on the Pokljuka plateau west of Bled.
Even so, for many visitors the way into the park leads through Bled. The Triglav National Park authority is based here at Ljubljanska cesta 27, in the same building as the Triglavska roža information centre, the regional tourism and nature conservation centre for Bled, Gorenjska and the park.
There is no park gate. According to the Bled Tourist Board, Triglav National Park has no fixed entrances and can be entered anywhere; there is no entrance fee for the park, only for individual attractions inside it.
Three places in the park are close to Bled: the Pokljuka plateau with the Pokljuka Gorge, almost two kilometres long, Vintgar Gorge on the eastern edge of the park and, a little further, Lake Bohinj with its trails into the mountains. The park's rules do not apply at Lake Bled itself, but they do at these places, for example the ban on drones.
Only 1.8 per cent of the park lies in the municipality of Bled. That very part, the Pokljuka, can be reached from Bled on the summer bus.
Bled Tourist Board: about Bled ↗
In numbers
- Altitude of Bled
- 501 m (1,644 ft)
- Altitude of the lake
- 475 m (1,558 ft)
- Length × width
- 2,120 × 1,380 m
- Area
- 144 ha (356 acres)
- Greatest depth
- 30.6 m (100 ft)
- Walk around the lake
- 6 km (3.7 mi), about 1.5 hours
- To the park boundary
- about 3 km (1.9 mi)
- Bled's share of the park
- 1.8%
