Sharr Mountains

The Sharr Mountains get skipped, which is partly geography and partly reputation. They sprawl across the south of Kosovo where it meets North Macedonia and Albania, far from Pristina and the monasteries and the easy day trips, and Kosovo as a whole is still a place a lot of people aren’t sure they’re allowed to enjoy. I’ll tell you plainly: this is one of the best mountain ranges in the Balkans, and on the late-spring day Lia and I walked into it we passed exactly two other people, both of them shepherds, both of them more interested in their dogs than in us.

Up to the lakes

The Sharr — Malet e Sharrit — were made a national park to protect a genuinely wild stretch of high country: bare grassy summits, beech and pine forest on the lower slopes, and scattered across the heights a series of glacial lakes that the locals call “the mountain eyes.” We hiked up toward one of them from a trailhead above the village, the path climbing steadily out of the forest into open alpine meadow thick with wildflowers and the constant, distant clonk of sheep bells. The lake, when we reached it, sat in a bowl of scree below a ridgeline still holding a few stubborn patches of snow, the water so still it had swallowed the sky whole.

We ate our bread and tomatoes on a rock by the shore and were promptly investigated by a Sharr dog — the local livestock guardian breed, an enormous calm creature the size of a small bear, who decided we were neither sheep nor threat and lay down a polite distance away to keep an eye on things.

The shepherds and the cheese

Coming down, we passed a stone shepherd’s hut with smoke coming from it, and the man inside waved us over with the unhurried hospitality you find in mountains everywhere and almost nowhere else. He was making cheese — the whole range runs on summer grazing and the cheese that comes from it, sharp white sheep’s cheese aged in brine that turns up on every table in this part of Kosovo. He handed me a slab off the cutting board, said something I didn’t understand a word of, and laughed openly at my face when I tasted it. It was extraordinary: salty, grassy, almost aggressive, nothing like the polite supermarket version. Lia, who claims not to like strong cheese, ate most of mine.

The Sharr have a ski resort at Brezovica that has seen better and worse decades, but the mountains themselves are the point in summer — a hiking range that feels genuinely undiscovered, where the trails are unmarked enough to be a small adventure and the only traffic jam is a flock of sheep filling the path. Kosovo spends a lot of its limited tourism energy on its monasteries and its complicated history, both of which are worth your time. But the Sharr are where I’d send anyone who wants to understand that this small, much-discussed country also contains some genuinely magnificent emptiness.

When to go: June through September for hiking, once the snow has cleared the high passes and the shepherds have moved their flocks up to the summer pastures. Winter brings skiing at Brezovica, though the infrastructure is patchy; for the lakes and the cheese-makers, come in summer.