This hike to the viewpoint for the Belovishte waterfall is about 9 km long with 625 m ascent.
Note that you will not get very close to the Belovishte waterfall itself, but you will see the waterfall from some distance. Nevertheless, it is an interesting hike with a small second waterfall on the way back as an added bonus
This hike to the longest waterfall in the Shar Mountains National Park starts in the village Belovishte, about an hour drive from Skopje.
There is a Second World War monument at the start of the hike.
A large part of the hike is on a covered forest trail, without a lot of good views.
At a certain moment there are some ruins, it was unclear to me what this used to be. Maybe just a stone wall.
The last part to the viewpoint is pretty steep with a lot of slippery leaves and hiking sticks are recommended here, especially for the descent back. Also for some of the steeper downhill parts of the second half of the hike it will be good to have some extra support from hiking sticks.
The viewpoint for the waterfall is really nice, even though the waterfall itself is quite a far away. The waterfall indeed is long, but with several stages and maybe it will be more spectacular in the spring or early summer when there is more water, compared to September when we visited.
There were quite a bit of thorny blackberry bushes on the second half of the trail.
A nice surprise were the smaller waterfalls on the way back near an area called Petochko Vodice. There are an interesting statue of woman, an arch across the river, and a cross to be seen here as well.
Close to the second waterfall there are two churches, St Jovan (St John) and St Petka. St Petka has a spring with holy water that is believed to cure eye diseases. There is plenty of opportunity for a picnic here, as well as a special building for BBQ!
After the churches you pass a swimming pool, which was empty when we were there.
We had a well-deserved lunch in one of the restaurants in this popular recreational area, the restaurant was named Aroma-S. The setting of the restaurant is very nice, the food was OK but not great, it for instance did not come with the rice that we ordered, because “the rice was not ready in time”, haha.
From the restaurant you follow the paved road back to the start, and you will pass the Church of St Bogorodica as well.
This hike gets 3.5 out of 5 stars.
You can view and download the GPS track of this hike here:
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