Vrhnika, the Roman river port where the Ljubljanica is born

Cankar’s house and Holy Trinity

At Na klancu 1 stands the memorial house of Ivan Cankar (1876-1918), the great Slovenian writer and playwright. He was born in a thatched wooden hut that burned down in 1879; the present house was built on the spot in 1880 and holds first editions, photographs and drawings of his. Above the town, the church of the Holy Trinity, from around 1640, is ringed by a wall with thirteen chapels, built around 1700, and was a popular pilgrimage goal in the 18th century.

The Ljubljanica springs and the Argonauts

The Ljubljanica is the river of seven names. It rises below Snežnik and sinks and resurfaces several times, until it springs up at Vrhnika in three groups of sources, Močilnik, Retovje and Bistra. At Močilnik, below 40 m walls known as the Hudičeve skale, legend places the end of the Argonauts’ voyage, where they dismantled the Argo to carry it on their shoulders to the Adriatic. The Argo appears on the town’s coat of arms.

The river is also one of the most interesting in Europe for archaeology. More than 6,000 objects have been raised from its bed, among them a wooden point 38,000 to 45,000 years old and a 1st-century Roman cargo boat found in 2008 near Sinja Gorica.

The Bistra Technical Museum and getting there

At Bistra, halfway to Borovnica, the Technical Museum of Slovenia fills a former charterhouse, with Tito’s cars and Ljubljana’s first tram, from 1901. Vrhnika is half an hour from Ljubljana, with nearly a hundred buses on Monday 19 October 2026. To carry on, see the Ljubljana Marshes, the guide to central Slovenia and Logatec, which keeps a fort from the same Roman wall.

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Nauportus, the Roman port

Vrhnika has 9,178 people and heads a municipality of 18,296 covering 115.7 km². As early as the mid-2nd century BC Strabo mentions a settlement called Nauportus, from «navis» and «portus», a stop on the freight route from Aquileia to Emona. Under Augustus it grew into an important port and depot. In the 3rd century the Romans raised the Claustra Alpium Iuliarum, a defensive wall that ran for more than 10 km within the municipality, with 62 towers. The Huns destroyed the town in the mid-5th century.

Vrhnika appears in writing in 1300 as Oberlaibach, and in the 17th century it enjoyed a golden age as the gateway between Trieste and Ljubljana, when the emperors Leopold I, in 1660, and Charles VI, in 1728, both came to visit.

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