Geography Atlas

Where Everything Happened
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Protected Area

Plitvice Lakes National Park

National Park

Plitvice Lakes National Park is one of the oldest and largest national parks in Croatia, established in 1949 in the mountainous karst region of the country's interior. The park is renowned for a chain of sixteen terraced lakes connected by waterfalls, colored in shades of turquoise, green and grey by mineral deposits and shifting light, all formed by ongoing travertine deposition that continues to reshape the landscape today. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 and was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger between 1992 and 1997 during the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Facts
Designation Category
National Park 1
Established Year
1949 1
Area (sq km)
296.85 1
Governing Body
Javna ustanova Nacionalni park Plitvicka jezera 1
IUCN Category
II 1
Classification
Governance Type
Governance by Government 1
Realm
Terrestrial 1
International Designation
UNESCO World Heritage Site 1
Governing Body
Governing Body (category)
National park public institution 1
FAQs

What makes the lakes of Plitvice Lakes National Park keep changing?

Ongoing tufa formation, driven by calcium carbonate and living organisms, keeps building the lake barriers.

UNESCO explains that the lake system is the result of millennia of ongoing geological and biochemical processes that create natural dams known as tufa barriers, formed by the deposition of calcium carbonate from the waters flowing through the park. This process of tufa formation interacts with living organisms, most importantly mosses, algae and aquatic bacteria.
Connections

Associated With

Croatia, Countries
Source Plitvice Lakes National Park (Wikipedia)
Sources
1. Plitvice Lakes National Park (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation
  • lead section
    Plitvice Lakes National Park is one of the oldest and largest national parks in Croatia. In 1979, Plitvice Lakes National Park was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
  • Infobox: governing_body
    Javna ustanova Nacionalni park Plitvička jezera
  • Lead section
    In 1979, Plitvice Lakes National Park was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, for its outstanding and picturesque series of tufa lakes, caves, and connected waterfalls. The national park was founded in 1949 and is in the mountainous karst area of central Croatia, at the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina.
  • Governing body field (existing citation)
    Javna ustanova Nacionalni park Plitvicka jezera
  • entity-description, international-designation unesco-world-heritage-site
    It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979 and was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger between 1992 and 1997 during the wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia.
View the Source
Wikidata: Plitvice Lakes National Park
  • Wikidata Q189849, class allow-list match (w-wdresolver-0926)
  • Part Of: Croatia, Wikidata item, property P17 (country)
View the Source
Wikidata: Croatia
On Continent: Europe, Wikidata item for Croatia, property P30 (continent)View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.