Slovenia

Slovenia has very tall mountains called the Alps.

The tallest one is Triglav. In another part, rain sinks into the ground. It makes caves and rivers under the ground.

About two-fifths of Slovenia is Alpine mountains. The highest peak, Triglav, is 2,864 meters tall, in the Julian Alps. Triglav National Park, Slovenia's only national park, protects the mountains around it.

In the southwest is the Kras, or Karst, a limestone region dotted with caves and underground rivers. It gave its name to all landscapes like it: scientists everywhere call them karst. Water is scarce there. In the east, the valleys of the Sava, Drava and Mura rivers have fertile farmland, and most of Slovenia's rivers flow toward the Danube.

Slovenia has four main physiographic regions. The Alpine region, about two-fifths of the country, includes the Kamnik-Savinja Alps, the Karavanke and the Julian Alps with Triglav, 2,864 m (Slovenia's Surveying and Mapping Authority refined the figure to 2,863.65 m in 2016). The Kras, a spur of the Dinaric Alps covering one-fourth of the land, is dotted with caves and underground rivers; scientific study of karst began here in the 18th century. Subpannonia, a fertile fifth in the east, holds the Sava, Drava and Mura valleys, and Primorska, barely one-twelfth, includes Slovenia's part of Istria.

Most rivers drain toward the Danube; the Soča rises beneath Triglav and reaches the Gulf of Venice in Italy. Istria is transitional between Mediterranean and moderate continental climates, with the cold bora wind; central and northern Slovenia have a cool-summer continental climate and the east has warmer summers. Below freezing is frequent from November to February, but snow cover has become less frequent. Forests, noted for their mushrooms, cover about three-fifths of the country, and Triglav National Park, first protected in 1924, covers 840 km², 4 percent of Slovenia.

Brown bears live in Slovenia.

Chamois and ibex live high in the mountains. A pale salamander called the olm lives in dark caves. It has no eyes you can see.

Slovenia is home to brown bears, wild boar and red, fallow and roe deer, and the lynx has come back. In Triglav National Park, chamois live on rocky ground above the trees in summer, and Alpine ibex were brought back starting in 1964. Alpine marmots, which had died out in the area long ago, were returned at the end of the 20th century.

Deep in the caves lives the olm, a pale salamander 25 to 30 centimeters long. It is the only animal with a backbone in Europe that lives only in caves, and it can live for up to 100 years.

Britannica lists protected species including the reintroduced but still rare ibex, the European brown bear, the chamois, the wild boar and red, fallow and roe deer, and notes that the lynx has reappeared; the Subpannonian lowlands suit migratory fowl, and the Soča is known for trout and grayling. Triglav National Park records about 7,000 species. There, chamois keep to open rocky terrain above the tree line in summer and move into forest in winter, ibex have been reintroduced since 1964 (all of Europe's ibex descend from the Gran Paradiso population in Italy), and Alpine marmots, extinct in the region since the end of the Ice Age, were reintroduced in the late 20th century.

The olm (Proteus anguinus), endemic to the Dinaric karst, is 25–30 cm long and, according to Slovenia's government information site, the only European vertebrate strictly bound to caves. Its eyes are vestigial and covered by skin, it keeps larval gills, it eats crustaceans, worms and snails, and it can live up to a hundred years. In 2016 an olm laid 64 eggs in Postojna Cave, and 22 young hatched.

About 2.1 million people lived in Slovenia in 2026.

Most people speak Slovene. Some people speak Italian or Hungarian too. Many families keep bees and make honey.

About 2.1 million people lived in Slovenia in 2026; early in the 2000s, only about half of the people lived in towns and cities. Most speak Slovene, a South Slavic language with a special feature: besides words for one thing and many things, it has a form for exactly two. Italian and Hungarian are also spoken in the areas where those communities live.

Beekeeping is a way of life for many families in Slovenia. Beekeepers care for about 200,000 bee colonies of the Carniolan bee, kept mostly in wooden bee houses near their homes, and many hives carry painted panels, a traditional art.

Britannica estimates that about nine-tenths of Slovenia's people are ethnically Slovene, descendants of Slavic settlers who arrived in the 6th century CE; Italians (mainly in Istria) and Hungarians (mainly in Prekmurje) are the two main ethnic minorities, and Roma communities are long established in the northeast and south. Many people also came from other former Yugoslav republics. SURS counted 10.7 percent foreign citizens among residents on 1 April 2026. Slovene, the official language, is one of the few languages to keep the dual number of Proto-Indo-European, used for exactly two persons or things. In the early 21st century about three-fifths of Slovenes were Roman Catholic, with smaller Muslim, Orthodox and Protestant communities.

In 2022 UNESCO added "Beekeeping in Slovenia, a way of life" to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list. The only bee kept in Slovenia is the Carniolan bee, in around 200,000 colonies, mostly in wooden apiaries near beekeepers' homes; bee products are used for food and traditional medicine, and hives carry characteristic painted panels.