The water-mill settlement of Rastoke
Rastoke was made by the game of nature at the place where the Slunjčica River flows into the river of Korana. The nature had played with turquoise waters of the river Slunjčica and divided them into a myriad of sputtering waterfalls of which the most beautiful ones are Buk, Hrvoje and Vilina kosa. By its founding Rastoke is actually the first introduction to the Plitvice lakes. Unlike these lakes Rastoke is special by intertwined human settlement with spoon-like water- mills (mlinica žličara) in this exuberance of green vegetation on inlets and cliffs made three hundred years ago. What the nature has made in thousands of years and a man built later on, while adjusting himself to the conditions of nature, with the surrounding limestone rocks, remnants of old settlements and the little town of Slunj fits harmoniously into a unique whole. Due to the harmony of the historic, ethnographic and construction cultural heritage Rastoke was noted in the Registry of the unmovable cultural monuments at the Regional Institute for protection of cultural monuments in Zagreb in 1969.
“We are going to the waterfalls. I cannot describe the suavity of these scenes, -flaring in the moonlight. Come over, traveller, and see! ” – Adolf Veber Tkalčević, a philologist and a travel book writer, 1860.
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