Story
The story of Štrbské pleso
Picture this lake in winter long ago, busy with about 200 workers cutting blocks of ice. Until 1902 huge amounts of ice were taken from here and sent as far as Vienna, Berlin and Budapest, and the royal court in Vienna ordered it too.
Štrbské pleso, at 1,346 metres, is the second largest lake on the Slovak side of the High Tatras, and no visible stream flows in or out: springs from below fill it. It is covered with ice for about 155 days a year.
The lake is named after the village of Štrba, and it belonged to the Sentiváni family until the Hungarian state bought it in 1901. The settlement on its shore began in 1872 with the first chalet and is the highest settlement in Slovakia. Its waters even shelter a rare fish, the maraena whitefish, probably the only place in the world where it lives in pure form.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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More highlights in High Tatras
- Belianska CaveBelianska Cave is a stalactite cave in the Slovak part of the Tatra Mountains, the largest and the only one open to the public in the Slovak Tatras.
- Tatra National Park MuseumMuseum in Tatranská Lomnica, open since 1969, which informs visitors about the fauna and flora of the High Tatras.
- Church of the Holy TrinityThe Articular church in Kežmarok is a wooden church in Kežmarok, Slovakia.
- Symbolic Cemetery at Popradské PlesoA memorial site since 1940 below the rock wall of Ostrva near Popradské pleso, with plaques bearing the names of people who died in the High Tatras and other mountains of the world.
- Kežmarok CastleCastle-palace in the town of Kežmarok, standing on the site of a 13th-century church that was rebuilt into a castle in 1462.
- HrebienokHrebienok is a small ski resort in the Tatra Mountains, in northern Slovakia. It is connected by the Starý Smokovec–Hrebienok funicular to the town of Starý Smokovec, which is in turn part of the Tatra Electric Railway.