Naklo, villages and forest between Kranj and Tržič

What to see in Naklo, starting with St Peter’s

This is the first thing I’d see. It was built in 1755 to plans by the architect Matija Perski, and the Udin boršt project website ranks it among the finest Baroque churches in Upper Carniola for the movement of its plan. It has five altars. The high altar, dedicated to St Peter, is by Janez Vurnik of Radovljica, and four side altars are by Valentin Vrbnik of Kranj. Below the altar is a relief of the Last Supper carved in Istrian marble by Franc Ksaver Zajec.

Duplje, a mansion and the shoemakers

Zgornje Duplje has Duplje Mansion, which was never a grand lord’s castle but the country house of the knights who managed the forest, first recorded between 1205 and 1208. A fire in 1832 left it in poor shape and for a century and a half it was little more than a farmhouse. The Mauser family restored it between 1976 and 1985, the year it was declared a cultural monument, and part of it became a museum and gallery. A hundred metres away, the Vogvar House, built of wood and over two hundred years old, has been an ethnographic museum since 1996, with its black kitchen and a shoemaker’s workshop, because almost every house in Duplje once had one.

Walking and cycling in Udin boršt

This is the area’s big natural draw, a broad forest shared by Kranj, Tržič and Naklo, with conglomerate karst, sinkholes, caves and sunny meadows. The Kranj Tourist Board lists five themed trails, on the conglomerate karst, the crooked fir tree and the bandits who hid out here, the water of Strahinj, the three bells and the Blata wetland. They work for walking and cycling. Other walks across the country are gathered in the guide to hiking in Slovenia.

If you are staying the night, see the best hotel deals in Kranj for your dates: the well-placed rooms go fast.

Millstones, a tsar and a railway

At Polica, on the edge of the forest, a family of stonecutters quarried millstones from the conglomerate for more than three centuries, until 1975. In 2003 the Pavlin-Jagodic family of the Poličar farm set up a small museum you can visit by appointment. In the centre of Naklo, a fountain and monument from 2002 remember Gregor Voglar, the local man who became Peter the Great’s personal physician. And until 1966 the Kranj to Tržič railway, opened in 1908, ran through here.

Is Naklo worth a stop?

Naklo works as an add-on to Kranj and to a trip round Upper Carniola, not as a place to spend several days. Watch the opening times, because neither the mansion nor the small museums publish current ones, so I’d phone or ask at the Kranj tourist office before going.

So you do not lose the morning at the ticket office, browse tickets and tours in Kranj on GetYourGuide.

If you are staying the night, see the best hotel deals in Kranj for your dates: the well-placed rooms go fast.