There are stone bunkers shrouded in the mist on the hillside to my right, just shy of the ridgeline marking the Albanian-Kosovo border. To my left, the view is not just clear but startlingly beautiful.
I’m able to see back down to the tiny mountain hamlet of Gacaferi, where I’d slept the previous night, to look across the deep greenery of Deçan Gorge beyond, over dense pine forests and grasslands that pop with pink and yellow wildflowers, and gaze all the way to the 2,461m summit of Çfërla and the rugged peaks of western Kosovo’s Accursed mountains.
We are on stage nine of the Via Dinarica Kosovo, a 75-mile, 13-stage hiking trail through this storied country. The route links up to the Via Dinarica, a Balkan trail that runs from Slovenia through to Albania. The Kosovo section opened in 2015, but was recently remapped and relaunched as part of a three-year, £1.2m project funded by the Italian agency AICS.
There was a Yugoslav barracks in Gacaferi during the Kosovo war – the brutal conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army (known locally as the UÇK) and Slobodan Milošević’s Yugoslavia, which ended with an aerial Nato bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. UÇK fighters used to launch surprise attacks over the border ridge here, and arms were smuggled into Kosovo for use by liberation fighters.
The barracks is long gone. Today, the handful of locals in Gacaferi fly red Albanian flags outside their houses alongside Kosovo blue. They tend to their sheep and warmly welcome hikers, who trade travel stories while feasting on burek and Rugova cheese in the scenic guesthouse.
“I wish the stones here could talk,” says Uta Ibrahimi, my mountain guide. Uta is the founder of Butterfly Outdoor Adventure, and was an integral part of the Via Dinarica Kosovo project. She also happens to be the first person from Kosovo to have climbed Mount Everest, having done so in 2017. And on 10 May 2025, when she stood on the 8,586-metre summit of Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas, Ibrahimi became the first woman from the Balkans to have climbed all 14 of the world’s 8,000-metre mountains. Uta returned to a hero’s welcome at Pristina airport. “I did it for myself, but also for my country,” Uta says. “Not just for the Himalayan views.”
I had arrived in the capital of Pristina some days earlier. I walked past statues of Bill Clinton and Bob Dole; past new cathedrals and centuries-old mosques. Brilliant, bizarre brutalist architecture draws the gaze here – most notably the National Library of Kosovo, formed of a cluster of exposed concrete blocks, caged in metal and topped by domes.
The Via Dinarica connects the municipalities of Peja, Deçan and Junik in western Kosovo. To start our adventure – hiking a 40-mile stint of the Via Dinarica – we drove to the city of Peja, behind which the Accursed mountains rise like fortress walls.
We began on stage three, with sunny alpine views and green slopes rising to prominent peaks. Red and white waymarkers guided us up narrow trails to the 2,403-metre Hajla peak, on the border of Kosovo and Montenegro. On one side, the ridgeline slopes sharply down to the Balkan pines of Kosovo and across green valleys to the mountains of Albania. On the other side, there is a near vertical drop down to Montenegro, via rugged, exposed limestone cliff.
I ate spinach burek for lunch on the summit of Hajla, sitting next to fuzzy, star-shaped edelweiss flowers, while alpine choughs circled above. We slept at ERA Lodge, a homely wooden mountain cabin run by Fatos Lajçi, a passionate conservationist. “Everything that’s in Europe, we have here,” he said; brown bears, wild boars, wolves and even the endangered Balkan lynx. This lynx is at serious risk of extinction, but has on occasion wandered by Lajçi’s camera traps.
As we left the next morning, a shepherd sang songs of love and lost heroes to his flock, and we rejoined the Via Dinarica on a freshly built section of trail. Descending into a meadow, we were engulfed in blueberry bushes; our boots brushing against wild strawberries and carrots.
It was not until a few days later, when we reached Kulla Guesthouse in Milishevc, a building styled like an old stone tower, that we met another hiker. Here, we gorged on köfte, washed down with rakı, “for digestion”.
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The border with Montenegro soon became the border with Albania. We walked by memorials to fallen UÇK soldiers. Hard rain and mist clouded the view, but limestone monoliths poked through and wildflowers defied the clouds with sprinkles of colour. By the time we arrived in Gacaferi, the sun was shining on the tractors and goats of this remote hamlet.
In the evenings there was time for me to bug Uta for stories. She is full of tales; of crampons received as Valentine’s gifts; of poles perilously dropped at 8,000 metres; of loved ones lost on mountain faces, or to war; of emotional summit days and ecstatic nights dancing at festivals.
Ibrahimi was 15 years old when war hit, but she speaks with a contagious positivity. “We had to stay inside for three months of bombing, and you never knew if it was the last day of your life,” she says. “We had to jump walls to run away from the police. That whole idea, of waiting for that moment they will come – and who knows what they will do to you – it just made us stronger and more willing to live. Then when you are free, you do not see any limits.”
From Gacaferi, we set our sights on the 2,656-metre Gjeravica. It is a hulking peak surrounded by heart-shaped mountain lakes and patches of snow. This side of the Accursed mountains is more dramatic than the border with Montenegro, the gentle green replaced by fierce grey. Above the 2,400-metre mark, we hike on limestone slabs bright with lichen. On the summit, a Kosovo flag flies above a trig point bearing the double-headed eagle of Albania. There is a metal marker with a UÇK head, and a view over Kosovo’s flatland. Our descent is remarkably pretty, running along the secluded Gjeravica Lake, through fields of blueberry bushes, on to grassland peppered with yellow flowers.
There is a soft beauty to this country; in the mint you smell in the meadows, in the sound of the whinchats on the hills, in the fluff of the edelweiss flowers on high ridges, and in the warmth of the guesthouses, where the burek is plentiful and the coffee strong.
“People want somewhere quiet, super-wild, without any roads,” says Uta. “It’s here to explore.”
The trip was provided by NaturKosovo. A five-day trip on the Via Dinarica Kosovo with Butterfly Outdoor Adventure costs €590, or a nine-day adventure from €990, including transfers, accommodation and meals. The Via Dinarica Kosovo project is being implemented by Volontari nel Mondo RTM and CELIM in collaboration with Utalaya Foundation, Club Alpino Italiano, AITR, CNSAS and AICS