ABSTRACT
The Upper Kolpa valley is a narrow canyon approximately 30 kilometres long and surrounded by high steep walls. Technically, there are two rivers: the uppermost section is the Cabranka, the tributary stream of the Kolpa river which enters the canyon at the town of Hrvatsko on the Croat side. The two rivers, however, share the canyon, which is thickly overgrown with what has been systematically preserved as virgin forest for the past eighty years. The preservation regime was first articulated in Hufnagel’s Plan of 1920 (Hartman 1992:110). Writing in the early nineteenth century in the Austrian derived and popular tradition of Heimatkunde, the geographers and historians of the older generations saw the valley as a ‘natural’ border site (cf. for example, Melik 1959, 1963).
