Serbia

The Danube is a very long river.

In Serbia, it squeezes through a deep, rocky gorge. The north is flat and good for farming. Mountains stand in the west and the east.

On Serbia's northeastern border, the Danube flows for about 100 kilometers through the Iron Gate, or Đerdap, a deep gorge through the Carpathian mountains. Upstream, on the flat Vojvodina plains, the river can be up to 3 kilometers wide. The Velika Morava, 470 kilometers long, is the largest river entirely inside Serbia.

The Vojvodina plains lie only 60 to 100 meters above sea level and have rich black soil. In the southwest, the Kopaonik Mountains reach 2,017 meters, and a peak in the Balkan Mountains on the Bulgarian border rises above 2,100 meters. Serbia has cold, fairly dry winters and warm, humid summers.

Britannica calls the Iron Gate (Đerdap) gorge on the northeastern border the most spectacular such feature in Europe: for 100 km the Danube crosses the Carpathians, its bed dropping 30 m, through four narrow constrictions joined by three basins. Before the joint Yugoslav-Romanian Đerdap hydroelectric dam was completed in 1972, rocks narrowed the river at one point to 90 m. The Velika Morava (470 km) drains two-fifths of the country; its valley and the Vardar's have been a route between central Europe and the eastern Mediterranean since prehistoric times. Apart from reservoirs, Serbia has no sizable lakes.

Vojvodina's plains (60–100 m) carry chernozem soils formed from the roots of countless generations of grasses, and loess left by winds in the last glacial period. The granite Kopaonik ridge (2,017 m) lies in a tectonically active zone. The climate is continental: Vojvodina averages about 22 °C in July and −1 °C in January, precipitation ranges from 560 to 1,900 mm, and snow covers the ground for about 40 days in the northern lowlands and 120 in the mountains.

Deer and bears live in Serbia's forests.

Wild pigs live in the beech forests. Lynx live in the eastern mountains. They have tufts on their ears.

Up to one-third of central Serbia is covered by broad-leaved forest, mostly oak and beech. The region name Šumadija even means "forested area," although much of it has been cleared for farms. Deer and bears are common in the forests, and wild pigs are a special feature of the mountain beech forests.

Serbia's national parks include Kopaonik and Tara in the southwest, Đerdap beside the Iron Gate, and Fruška Gora in Vojvodina. In Đerdap, lynx hunt roe deer, mountain goats and rabbits. Lynx are strictly protected, and hunting them is not allowed.

Serbia's vegetation forms a transition between central European and Mediterranean types. Before Austrian farm colonization in the 18th century, the Vojvodina plains were grassland steppe; only about 5 percent of the province is now wooded, mostly on Fruška Gora and in wetlands along the Danube and Sava. Up to one-third of Serbia proper is broad-leaved forest, mostly oak and beech, rising to two-fifths or more in the mountains. Deer and bears abound in the forests, and wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are a distinctive feature of the mountain beech forests.

Its national parks include Kopaonik and Tara in the southwestern mountains, Đerdap beside the Iron Gate and Fruška Gora in Vojvodina. Đerdap stretches 100 km along the Danube's right bank; there the Eurasian lynx, which preys mostly on roe deer, mountain goats and rabbits, is strictly protected, the beech forest on Šomrda is the northernmost habitat of holly in Serbia, and the rare bear hazel, a relict tree that can grow 30 m tall, survives in protected sites.

About six and a half million people live in Serbia.

Most people speak Serbian. Serbian is written with Cyrillic letters. Farmers grow corn, wheat, plums and raspberries.

About 6.5 million people lived in Serbia in 2025, and more than half live in towns and cities. Most people are Serbs. Hungarians and Bosniaks are the largest minorities, and Roma, Croats, Montenegrins, Bulgarians and Romanians live in Serbia too.

Serbian is very close to Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, but it is usually written in its own version of the Cyrillic alphabet. Corn covers about a third of the farmland, and wheat comes next. Plum orchards are common in the hills, and raspberries have become an important crop. A folk dance called the kolo is danced by people of all ages in towns and villages.

The Statistical Office's 2025 estimate was 6,549,901 people, 51.3 percent of them women. More than four-fifths identify as Serbs; the principal minorities are Hungarians and Bosniaks, and Roma, Croats, Montenegrins, Bulgarians and Romanians also live there. In Vojvodina, Serbs make up slightly more than half of an exceptionally diverse population. Only one-fifth of Serbs were urban in 1948; by the early 21st century more than half of the population lived in cities. Serbian national identity is tied to an Eastern Orthodox Christian heritage, while Vojvodina's Hungarians are Roman Catholic or Calvinist.

Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin are essentially one language, linguistically termed Serbo-Croatian; Serbian is distinguished in writing by a modified Cyrillic alphabet. Agriculture has shifted from livestock toward crops: corn occupies about one-third of the cropland, followed by wheat, with sugar beets, sunflowers and potatoes; plum orchards characterize the uplands, and raspberries grown for western European markets have become important. Kolo, a folk dance danced by all age groups in towns and villages, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2017; its oldest recorded versions come from central Serbia in the second half of the 19th century.