Laško

Laško is the kind of town that Slovenians know intimately and most foreign visitors drive straight past on the highway between Celje and Zagreb. We stopped because of the beer, honestly — Pivovarna Laško brews the country’s best-known lager, and I wanted to see the town it came from before I wrote it off as just a supermarket label.

The Brewery and the River

Laško’s brewery sits right along the Savinja, and while the full production tour requires advance booking, we managed a walk-through of the visitor exhibit that traces the beer’s history back to 1825, when local monastic and civic brewing traditions in the area were formalized into an actual commercial operation. The tasting room afterward gave us a cold glass of unfiltered Zlatorog, maltier and less fizzy than the bottled version I’d had before, drunk standing at a counter with brewery workers on their break beside us.

Outside, the Savinja moves fast and green through town, and there’s a pleasant riverside walk past old mill buildings and a small island park that locals use for evening jogs. It’s an unglamorous, working sort of beauty, which after a week of postcard vineyards was oddly refreshing.

Thermal Water on the Side

Laško is also a spa town in its own right, with thermal springs feeding the Thermana Laško complex on the edge of town — pools, saunas, the usual central-European wellness circuit, but priced and paced in a way that felt local rather than resort-branded. We spent a late afternoon soaking in an outdoor pool as the light dropped over the hills, beer from earlier still faintly on my breath, which felt like an appropriately unpretentious way to end a day here.

Lia pointed out, floating on her back and looking unbothered by anything, that Laško seemed to know exactly what kind of town it was — beer, water, river, repeat — and made no effort to be anything grander. After the wine hills and pilgrimage churches further east, it was a good, plain place to land.

When to go: Year-round for the thermal spa, though summer evenings by the river are especially pleasant. Book brewery tours ahead if you want the full production visit rather than just the tasting room.