Suchá Belá
Seven waterfalls and twenty-metre vertical ladders.
Zdenek Svoboda from Prague, Czech Republic — CC BY 2.0 · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Jozef Kotulič — CC BY 4.0 · gbohne from Berlin, Germany — CC BY-SA 2.0
No: the ladders are fixed and the routes well marked, and good shoes suffice. But the gorges are not a stroll — four hours of continuous ascent, and summer crowds slow movement badly, so start early.
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Gorges climbed by iron ladders above waterfalls: Slovak Paradise, a national park south of the Tatras, is unique in Europe for how you walk it — narrow gorges cut by water through limestone, their routes fitted with iron ladders, chains and timber bridges climbing alongside the waterfalls themselves, so you move up the streambed rather than beside it. The most famous is Suchá Belá: four hours of ascent past seven waterfalls and vertical ladders twenty metres long — and the route is compulsorily one-way, upward only, because descending them is dangerous and effectively impossible in crowds. Easier gorges exist, like Prielom Hornádu along the river, and harder ones like Kyseľ. At the park's centre stand the ruins of the fourteenth-century Carthusian monastery of Kláštorisko with a café — the traditional resting point. There are several entrances, the best known being Podlesok near Hrabušice, half an hour from Poprad by car.
Seven waterfalls and twenty-metre vertical ladders.
Fourteenth-century Carthusian ruins and a café.
Hrabušice / Podlesok, Slovakia