Golden Ring of Medvednica: A Three-Day Circular Trail from Zagreb to the Zagorje Valley and Home

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Peak to Valley, as Walked — Tuškanac, Sljeme, Donja Podgora, Medvedgrad

Three days on Medvednica, 18–20 August 2026. The maps page was the plan. This is the line the GPS actually drew — city to summit, north face into Zagorje, then home over Medvedgrad.

For months the expedition lived as a drawing. Peak to Valley named the shape: up the southern slopes to Sljeme, down the hidden north face into Zagorje, then one continuous path from Kraljev Vrh through Medvedgrad into Tuškanac. The April essay on Podcaster Capital called it sixty-four kilometres. The films already flew the ridge. The GPX cards were public before I packed a bottle.

Then I walked it.

🧭 Golden Ring · GPX explorer
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Tuesday to Thursday, 18–20 August 2026. Seven AllTrails recordings, a phone full of ordinary frames, and a paper sign held up under the television tower because the high point fell on a Tuesday. The GPS, added together, is 47.5 kilometres and about 2,550 metres of climbing. The missing kilometres from the old 64 are not a failure. They are a train after the north face, a few unrecorded last steps to the tower, and the pauses where the track went silent. The shape of the plan survived. The walk was more honest than the drawing.

Route Recorded Climb / loss Moving time
Tue 18 Tuškanac → Gračani → Sljeme 12.7 km +957 / −316 m 3 h 44
Wed 19 Sljeme north face → Donja Podgora 15.4 km +564 / −1,257 m 3 h 35
Thu 20 Kraljev Vrh → Medvedgrad → Tuškanac 19.4 km +1,024 / −1,060 m 5 h 37
Total City → peak → valley → city 47.5 km +2,545 / −2,633 m 12 h 56

Zagreb’s weather station, a few hundred metres from where I started, tells the rest of the week. Monday the 17th had dumped 22 millimetres of rain. Tuesday opened cool: 18.5 °C at the low, 29 °C at the high, almost on the August normal. Wednesday climbed to 33.9 °C. Thursday, the long return, hit 36 °C. The mountain still had shade. The villages did not.

Day 1 · Tuesday · The high point

I started in Tuškanac, not at Ban Jelačić. The expedition did not need another crossing of the square. It needed the park at the inner edge of the mountain, where the city has already begun to think of itself as a forest.


11:12 · Miroslav Krleža in Tuškanac. The walk begins under a writer, not a trail blaze.

Krleža stands on the lawn in that heavy bronze cloak, the terraced villa behind him already catching the first real sun of the day. I started the GPS two minutes later on Tuškanac street, 181 metres above the sea, and walked north.

The first recording is almost seven kilometres: through Gornji Grad–Medveščak into Podsljeme, into Gračansko Dolje, onto Lonjščina. By early afternoon I was in the foothills, and the mountain had begun to speak in its own language — the red-and-white circle of the Croatian mountain path.


13:01 · Trail 14. Sljeme in two hours fifteen. Planinarski dom Runolist in two. PD Šumar, Zagreb.

This is Leustekova staza, the line I had already named on the maps page: Gračani, Adolfovac, Stara lugarnica, Činovničko sedlo, the summit corridor. A picnic shelter under spruce. A wooden plank bridge over a thin summer stream. A beech with the blaze painted thick and low, the bark around it pale and knuckled.


16:04 · The only sign you really need, once the city is behind you.

I recorded the climb in three pieces, with a long pause in Gračani in the early afternoon. That is how this mountain actually works if you live here: you do not have to be heroic in a single push. You can eat, sit, start again. The third recording ended at 904 metres, still short of the tower. The last steps to Sljeme I walked without the watch.


17:59 · The gondola coming up the way I did not take.

The cable car floated through the late sun. The OIV tower stood on its hill like the argument the mountain makes to the whole basin. I had been here before. I had not arrived like this — on foot from Tuškanac, on a Tuesday, with the week still in front of me.


18:14 · Sljeme. 1,033 metres. The high point of the expedition, and of the city.

At 20:10 I stood under the tower and held up a sheet of paper: Tuesdays 4 Climate Revolt. Not a crowd. Not a speech. The same quiet Tuesday practice I have kept in the city, carried to the one landmark every Zagreb child can draw from memory. The expedition’s summit was never going to be only a television mast. It was a place to stand still.


20:10 · Tuesday, under the tower. The high point of the walk, and of the week.

Recorded for the day: 12.7 km, 957 metres of climb. The plan had said about fourteen. Close enough. The mountain had taken the afternoon, and then the evening, and I was still on it when the light went blue.

Day 2 · Wednesday · The downhill that isn’t easy

The maps page promised a long north-face descent — fifteen to twenty kilometres, about 790 metres down. The GPS the next morning started at 964 metres on the ridge and finished at 222 metres in Donja Podgora, a village of Donja Stubica. Net drop: 742 metres. Actual loss, because a descent on Medvednica is never only down: 1,257 metres. You still climb 564 metres on a “downhill” day. The knees notice both numbers.


11:07 · North side. Shade, camber, and a road that keeps offering another bend.

This is the face of the mountain Zagreb does not see from its windows. Stubičke Toplice municipality. The hamlet of Pila. Then Donja Podgora. Beech and fir, a paved forest road that leans and leans, the temperature rising as the altitude falls. Wednesday in the city would reach 33.9 °C. Under the canopy it was still a hike. In the orchards it became a different country.


13:59 · Looking back. The tower is still there. The city is not.

That is the photograph the downhill exists to take. From Zagreb, Sljeme is a mast on a green wall. From Zagorje it is a needle over someone else’s forest. I had walked from one reading of the mountain to the other in three and a half hours. 15.4 kilometres. Average a little over four kilometres an hour — the only day of the three that was mostly down.

The April plan had imagined continuing on foot from the thermal valley all the way west to Kraljev Vrh, a twenty-five-kilometre second day. I did not do that. I came off the mountain into Donja Podgora, into the heat, and later there was an HŽ train, blue as a swimming pool, and a dry hillside of red roofs. The expedition used the railway. That is also how you live with a mountain that has a city on one side and a railway on the other.


16:05 · HŽ Putnički prijevoz. The north face ends where the timetable begins.


16:26 · Zagorje in August: hay the colour of bread, the tower still on the skyline if you know where to look.

I had written, before I walked, that the north side is steeper, wetter, more secluded. In this week of the year it was not wet. It was secluded. And it did what the plan asked: it took me off the capital’s mountain and set me down in the other Croatia, the one with orchards and a local train, close enough to Stubičke Toplice that the old thermal story is still in the air.

Day 3 · Thursday · One line home

Thursday was the day I had already rehearsed. The live GPX, Kraljev Vrh to Tuškanac, had been on the maps hub for weeks: 19.16 kilometres, via Gornja Bistra and Medvedgrad. The walk that happened was 19.35 kilometres. The drawing and the feet finally agreed.

I started at 11:05 on Turistička cesta in Kraljev Vrh, municipality of Jakovlje, 209 metres up. The first hour is not mountain. It is Zagorje still: a new asphalt ribbon, power lines, dry verge, the Ivanščica hills in the distance. Then Bolnička ulica in Jarek, Gornja Bistra, and the ground begins to mean it.


11:49 · Still in the villages. The climb has not started. The heat has.

From Gornja Bistra the west slope of Medvednica takes over. Staza 46 through Novaki Bistranski. Beech again, the path a trough of last year’s leaves, the air suddenly green. The high point of the day — and the second summit of the expedition — was 815 metres on the Šestine side of the ridge. Not Sljeme. The other shoulder. The one that looks at Zagreb.


13:04 · The west slope. This is the silence I keep coming back for.

Then the descent I already knew from July: the ridge path with the city suddenly under it, a single cloud in a hard sky, gravel the colour of bone. Medvedgrad sits on that shoulder like a sentence the mountain has been finishing since the thirteenth century. I did not need to discover the fortress. I needed to pass it on the way home, which is a different use of a castle.


14:43 · Zagreb from the ridge. The city you left on Tuesday, waiting at the bottom of Thursday.

Down through Šestine. The cobbles — that old, stubborn pavement that photographs as a climb even when your knees are going the other way. Šestinski trg at 287 metres. A pause. Then the evening recording: three kilometres along Dubravkin put, into Kraljevec, to 178 metres, a few streets from where Tuesday had begun.


15:16 · Šestine cobbles. The mountain handing you back to the city, one stone at a time.

Thursday was the hottest of the three days. 36 °C in the city, 1.7 millimetres of rain somewhere in the meteorological day, none of it on me. The beeches held. The villages baked. I finished at 18:33, 19.4 kilometres after Kraljev Vrh, 1,024 metres of climb in the legs on a “return” day. The loop had closed.

What the plan got right

The maps page divided the mountain into three ideas, and those ideas were correct.

Day 1 is the city learning to be a mountain. Tuškanac, Gračani, Trail 14, the Leustek line, the tower. You start under a statue and end under a transmitter. The noise falls off in layers.

Day 2 is the other country. The north face does not care that Zagreb thinks Medvednica is a park. It drops you into Stubičke Toplice and Donja Stubica, into a valley that looks back at the tower as a distant fact. Downhill is the hard day in disguise.

Day 3 is one sentence. Kraljev Vrh, Gornja Bistra, the west ridge, Medvedgrad, Šestine, Tuškanac. I had already walked pieces of this — the July afternoon to the fortress, the Bistra approaches, the city finish. Thursday was the first time they were a single path.

What the plan overstated was distance as a badge. Sixty-four kilometres made a good radio title. Forty-seven and a half, honestly timed, with a train in the middle and a Tuesday sign at the top, is the expedition I can stand behind. The mountain is 1,033 metres, not the Alps. The point was never to suffer it. The point was to read it in three directions — south, north, and west — and to come home on foot.

If you walk it. Start Tuesday only if you like the joke. Carry more water than the April version of yourself thinks you need. The north face is longer in the knees than on the map. Day 3 is the real day: nineteen kilometres and a second thousand metres of climb in August heat. The live GPX files are on the maps hub. Mistakes happen — double-check before you follow anything blindly, including this.

Tracks, films, voice

The recordings, in the order they were made:

The plan that this walk completed:

I left Tuškanac under Krleža and came back along Dubravkin put. In between: a red circle on a beech, a gondola I did not board, a sign on a Tuesday, a tower seen from the wrong side of the forest, a blue train, a gravel path with Zagreb under it, and cobbles that have been taking people off this mountain for a long time.

The drawing is still on the maps page. The walk is in the GPS. They are not the same object. That was the point.

Luka Jagor · August 2026 · luka.jagor.info/maps/Peak-to-valley.html · Licensed under CC BY 4.0

Distances and elevation from the seven AllTrails GPX recordings, 18–20 August 2026. Weather from the Zagreb station (45.81°N, 15.97°E, 157 m). Park prirode Medvednica.

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