With its natural beauty, extraordinary cultural landscape and preserved ethnological heritage, Topla Landscape Park invites visitors to the majestic Peca Mountain. High, mighty and lonely farms like Burjak, Florin, Kordež, Fajmut and Končnik are surrounded by far-reaching, dense larch and spruce forests. Those large farms are actually considered small settlements, and ethnologists call them smallholdings.
Like the entire Meža valley, mining strongly influenced life here in Topla. The beginnings of lead and zinc ore mining go back to 1834, but today Topla’s mine is closed and protected as a natural monument. Rich deposits of rare minerals from under Peca Mountain represent the place’s priceless geological heritage. Over 230-million-years-old rocks hide fossilised snails and ammonites, and those historical treasures reveal that the area was once under the sea. The Topla river valley’s pristine, unspoilt nature gives visitors a unique chance to discover rare and protected animal and plant species. If you’re lucky, you might catch sight of mountain hare, black grouse, western capercaillie, stone crayfish, brook bivalves, Swiss pine, alpine snowbell and Jovibarba (subspecies arenaria).
