What to see in Šariš, Slovakia: tips from Milan Bez Mapy

Šariš is much more than beer. I spent a week here and still kept finding new things. I wouldn’t skip Šariš Castle, the Zlá diera cave near Lipovce, Lačnov Canyon or the chairlift up Lysá in the Čergov hills. If you can, add Bardejov and the spa town of Bardejovské Kúpele to the trip.

Quick factsby Milan Bez Mapy

From the airport

I flew to Košice, picked up a car at the airport and was in Šariš in under an hour

How many days

Allow five to seven days; the places are 20 to 40 minutes’ drive apart

Where I stayed

A new hotel by the station in Prešov, a 30-minute walk from the centre; next time I’d stay closer to Hlavná, the main street

Cave near Lipovce

No electric lighting, you light your own way, 7°C inside all year; call ahead

My tip

I combined Lačnov Canyon and the cave in one day and parked in Lipovce by the football pitch

Lysá chairlift

For now weekends only in summer, daily in winter; on foot the shortest way up takes about 45 minutes

What to see in Šariš? I asked myself that before the trip, and the answer surprised me more than I’d expected. Šariš is a region where a castle ruin looks down at you from every other hill, where one village of 1,300 people once had eleven manor houses belonging to a single family, and where one man spent 35 years building the path to a cave.

And yet when you tell people in Bratislava you’re going to Šariš, most of them only picture the beer of the same name. Ironic, isn’t it? Time to change that.

What to see in Šariš: my tips for a visit

I spent the hottest week of the summer here and left with one sentence in my head, one that runs through the whole region. In Šariš, it’s individual people who save the historic buildings. A village that bought a manor house knowing it didn’t have the money to finish the job. A caver who spent half his life on his cave.

A woman who came back from Switzerland to the ruin her grandparents left behind. A family who got a dead chairlift from 1983 running again. Once you notice it, you’ll see it everywhere in Šariš.

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How to get to Šariš and how many days to plan

Flying to Košice and hiring a car at Košice Airport

I flew from Bratislava to Košice, because by car it’s half of Slovakia away and the train takes even longer. From Košice Airport I was in Šariš in under an hour, and in Prešov even sooner. I picked up a car right at the airport, and without it I wouldn’t have got anywhere in the region, because most of the places I write about below are in villages where the bus runs only a few times a day. The Šariš region is just ‘around the corner’.

Where to stay in Šariš

There are basically three ways to do it, and each has its own logic. I chose Prešov as my base for the western and southern part of the region, because from there it’s 5 km to Šariš Castle and under half an hour to the cave in Lipovce. I stayed in a new hotel near the station and was happy with it, with one reservation I’d think through beforehand next time.

It’s a 30-minute walk from the centre, so in the evenings, when I got back tired after a day out, I didn’t make it into town, even though I wanted to. If you also want to see Prešov properly, I’d look for somewhere closer to Hlavná, the main street.

The spa in Bardejov makes sense if you’re focusing on the north of the region, but accommodation there doesn’t work as it does in an ordinary town: you don’t book rooms through the big booking sites, and spa guests come first. The third option is a mountain hut on Lysá, with both the chairlift and the ridge trail on your doorstep.

How many days do you need for Šariš?

In three days you’ll manage the castle, the cave and one canyon, and you’ll feel you’ve seen Šariš. You haven’t. I’d allow five to seven days, because the places are 20 to 40 minutes’ drive apart and most of them deserve more than a 20-minute dash. I had less than an hour in Krivany, and I still regret leaving in the middle of the story.

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Things to do in Šariš: Milan Bez Mapy’s picks

Šariš Castle in Veľký Šariš

I’ll start with a detail you won’t work out on the spot unless someone tells you. When you stand in the courtyard of Šariš Castle, you’re standing on an extinct volcano. The castle hill is a cone of andesite, a remnant of ancient volcanic activity, and the whole hill has been a national nature reserve since 1964.

The castle grounds cover more than 4 hectares and the built-up area alone exceeds 2.7 hectares, which makes Šariš Castle one of the largest medieval ruins in Slovakia. The first written record dates from 1245, under the name Sarus, and the castle stood here because of the trade route that ran north to south along the Torysa valley. After the Battle of Mohács, the Habsburgs turned it into a military fortress with a permanent garrison of around 200 foot soldiers.

At the top stands the donjon, the French term for a keep, the tower that was meant never to fall. Its walls are 4.5 m thick and it was originally about 30 m tall. Fifteen years ago only about 7 m of it was left; today it stands 15 m high. According to locals, on a clear day you can see three countries from the top and six other castle ruins in the region at once, including Kamenica, Kapušany and Hanigovce castles. The staircase is narrow on purpose: it was built for hand-to-hand fighting, and the advantage lay with whoever attacked from above with a halberd.

• Tip from Milan The castle is open all year, more or less round the clock. I found guides here from April to October and at weekends in winter. There are no guides on Mondays.

Why Šariš Castle never had a well, and how it got drinking water

Few people ask this question at the castle, and yet the answer sums up the Middle Ages. There is no well at Šariš Castle and there never was, because the whole hill is andesite and there’s simply no water in it. They solved it with filter wells and about six cisterns, where they collected rainwater and cleaned it through charcoal and herbs grown right on the castle hill. Below the Alžbetka tower they had vineyards, because diluted wine was safer to drink than water. The servants drank it, and so did the children.

The second thing that wouldn’t leave me alone: in 1660 the gunpowder store here blew up, and according to the local version it was the fault of a soldier who fell asleep on night watch with a pipe in his mouth. Twenty-seven years later, in 1687, the castle burned down and nobody ever rebuilt it. You can still see the consequences, even if you don’t know about them. Nobody cleared the rubble after the explosion, so today you’re walking on 2 to 3 m of debris. Under your feet there’s a chapel and houses that no one has dug out yet. The crumbling walls take priority.

The Night of Castle Ruins: the Šariš castles linked by light

If you can plan your trip around a specific date: during the Night of Castle Ruins, usually in mid-August, the castles of Šariš are linked by light. It revives the medieval way of signalling with fire between castles within sight of each other.

The first one lights up, and every two to three minutes another joins in. They’ve been doing it for years, and castles outside the region are gradually joining too, such as Stará Ľubovňa, Vinné and Plaveč. When I first heard about it, I thought: in another country, this is exactly the kind of event that would have its own campaign and buses from the neighbouring towns.

The cave near Lipovce (Zlá diera)

I’ll be blunt. Visiting Slovak caves often feels like a waste of time to me. Especially in the state-run ones, you get a guide who has learnt a simple script by heart about how this stalactite looks like a giraffe and that one like a baby elephant, and now make three wishes and Princess Esmeralda will grant them. No added value, zero information. You walk along a lit path between railings, and an hour later you can’t say what you’ve learnt.

The cave near Lipovce is the exact opposite, and that’s down to who takes you through it. It’s looked after by the caver Rudolf Košč, who incidentally is the father of the singer Katka Koščová, and my guide was the caver Michaela Pancuráková, a geography and chemistry teacher who wrote her thesis on this cave and is one of the few women cavers in Slovakia. She explained it all so well that after 40 minutes I wanted to be a caver myself.

You feel the difference after the first sentence: between someone who gets through a paying group because the next one is waiting outside, and someone for whom this is a lifelong hobby.

On to the cave itself. It’s the only show cave in the whole Prešov district. It opened in 1999 and has no electric lighting. You get a helmet and light your own way, either with a caver’s carbide lamp or your own head torch. It’s 7°C inside all year, so even when it’s 30°C outside, a hoodie is worth bringing. The basic route takes about 40 minutes and children can manage it too.

The cave formed not in limestone but in dolomite, which you can tell by eye because the rock is grey rather than white, and it’s about four million years old. In winter around 250 bats sleep here. Locals used to see it as an ordinary hole in the ground where cattle went missing from time to time, and they told children that devils lived there.

At the end you choose. Either you climb a ladder, or you squeeze through a narrow opening they call the birth canal, which is about the size of your helmet. I took the ladder because it felt claustrophobic, and I’m not ashamed of it. But what I take away from the visit is something else. I could be in the most beautiful cave in Slovakia, and it would still be about the people.

• Tip from Milan The cave is open from April to mid-November and has no fixed entry times. You go in small groups, so the wait can be 5 seconds or 50 minutes. It’s best to call ahead.
• Tip from Milan From the car park by the road between Lipovce and Lačnov it’s about a 20-minute walk to the cave, first across a meadow and then along a forest path.

Lačnov Canyon and the Srdiečko viewpoint: route, parking and what you’ll see

Not far from the cave lies Lačnov Canyon (Lačnovský kaňon), which locals call the Little Slovak Paradise. The gorge is about 2 km long, carved out by the Lačnov stream, and some sections have metal steps, ladders, footbridges and chains to hold on to. It’s not difficult, but it’s not a stroll on tarmac either. In the rock you’ll see giant’s kettles, holes drilled not by people but by water swirling round and round for centuries.

The best-known rock is Kamenná baba (the Stone Woman), which looks like a woman holding a child. Legend has it she was a stepmother who wanted to throw her stepchild off the rock and turned to stone before she could. The whole national nature reserve has been named after her since 1964. Further along the canyon stand the 60-metre Moses’ Pillar (Mojžišov stĺp) and the rock window Vrátnica. On the forest path towards the cave there’s also the Srdiečko (‘Little Heart’) viewing platform, a steel beam set between two rock cliffs.

• Tip from Milan I parked in Lipovce by the football pitch, where a wooden gate and a trail sign lead into the canyon. Parking is paid by QR code. You can combine the canyon and the cave in one day; that’s what I did.

The Salvator mineral spring in Lipovce

Sixteen mineral springs have been documented in the Lipovce area, and in the early 19th century Count Szakmáry named one of them Salvator, the Saviour. He also started bottling it and shipping it out, which makes it one of the oldest bottled mineral waters in Slovakia.

In 1880 the Hungarian government declared protection zones for these springs, which wasn’t common at the time. In the first half of the 19th century Lipovce was a spa where nobility from all around Prešov came to take the cure.

The chairlift up Lysá in the Čergov hills

The chairlift up Lysá dates from 1983, and for almost 20 years it was as good as dead. The previous owners put it back together and got it running, but with timing I wouldn’t wish on anyone. They started building in August 2021, and by 1 January they had the lift, a snow-covered slope and the whole operation ready. Then came the Covid ban, and in the end they sold the resort. Today’s operators are getting it going again, and their biggest problem isn’t promotion but the fact that people in the area still don’t know the lift is running again.

You can also walk up; the shortest route takes about 45 minutes. I took the chairlift. From the top you can see the Tatras, the Low Tatras, south as far as Kojšovská hoľa and north into Poland. And there’s a bus that someone hauled up to the summit and turned into a shelter with seating and, in winter, a bar.

A telehandler pushed it, a tractor pulled it, and a snow groomer pushed it the last few metres across the grass. When I asked why, the answer was simple. People meet here from all sides of the ridge and they needed a roof over their heads.

• Tip from Milan In winter the chairlift runs daily; in summer, for now, only at weekends, from 9am to 6pm. If you come in a group of 40 or more and let them know in advance, they’ll run it on other days too.
• Tip from Milan Both the hut and the summit have a stamp and a summit book. Collecting stamps motivates me on a completely different level from any discount. I first saw the system in Ushuaia, where tourists buy a passport and get it stamped wherever they’ve been.

The Čergov nature trail for children

Near the chairlift starts a 980-metre nature trail, which was a month old when I visited. It was built for a very practical reason: there used to be no comfortable path up to the hut for older people and children. The whole trail is in the shade, which at 32°C I noticed after just a few metres.

The boards, which you can read from both sides, tell the story of the shepherd Čergov and a witch who steals his cauldron. Along the way there are clues with letters that children put together into a word, and at weekends they get a reward for it.

Horse riding on Čergov

In the morning, before going up Lysá, I went riding through the Čergov forests, and it was the best hour of the whole day. You ride through the woods with views you can’t get anywhere from a car, and on the way we even stopped at that bus in the forest. I arranged the horses through a ranch in the village of Červená Voda, and it’s one of those things you need to book by phone in advance, not on the spot.

Hiking on Čergov

The Čergov ridge is about 35 km long and runs over Veľká Javorina and Prihyby to Minčol. The Čergov Ultramarathon is run here: 32 km with around 1,400 m of ascent. If you don’t fancy the ridge, there’s an easy via ferrata in an old quarry below Lysá that both children and people afraid of heights climb. Bears don’t live here permanently; they only pass through.

Krivany manor house and the Folk Culture Centre

Krivany has around 1,300 inhabitants today, yet it once had eleven or twelve manorial farms and as many as eleven manor houses belonging to one family, the Dessewffys. The reason is prosaic: estates were divided among descendants until one large property had become ten small ones, each with its own residence. Today one is left, and it belongs to the village.

The manor house is Renaissance, from the first half of the 17th century, and was originally fortified, with an attic parapet, loopholes and two round bastions. After a fire at the end of the 18th century it was rebuilt in the Classicist style, and in 1863 Lajos Bornemisza received it as a wedding present. In 1947 it was confiscated from the family; after the 1989 revolution it was returned in restitution, and in 2000 the village bought it together with a hectare and a half of land.

And now the part I found most interesting. During a rebuild in the 1980s, 40 cm of concrete was poured into the basement. Concrete doesn’t breathe: it started drawing up water and pushing it into the walls, so during the restoration they had to chisel it out by hand, cart it away and fill the same space with 40 cm of drainage stone. The most expensive part of the restoration wasn’t the old part, but the part someone had added in good faith.

And one more detail I didn’t expect. From 1996 to 2000 there was a disco here, and people came from as far away as Košice and Michalovce.

Next to the manor house is the Folk Culture Centre with its granary (sypanec), an exhibition on bread-making from sowing the grain to grinding the flour, Krivany cooking, and a wooden cottage from 1899 that was brought here from elsewhere. A lady from the seniors’ day centre stopped me here to say she follows me on Instagram, and she wanted a photo. Šariš isn’t a region crowded with tourists, and you feel it in every village.

Who was Ján Lazorík, and why Krivany has a folk festival

A name you hear in Krivany all the time. Ján Lazorík was born in 1920 and died in 2015, three weeks before his 95th birthday. He was a teacher, and alongside his job he travelled around the villages of eastern Slovakia with a tape recorder, a camera and notebooks, recording whatever he could.

He left the museum in Stará Ľubovňa 12,000 photographic negatives, hundreds of tapes and 38 field notebooks. From 1992 he published 24 books, most of them in the Šariš dialect. All his life he campaigned for a reform of Slovak: he wanted to get rid of the letter y.

In 1968 he founded a folk ensemble in Krivany and built an amphitheatre here. The festival he started has now had more than 30 editions, and the village still associates it with him alone. It always takes place on the second weekend of August and draws about 3,000 people. I left with his book under my arm, which has a dictionary of the Šariš dialect at the back. Since then I’ve known that gruľa is a potato, nálešníky are potato pancakes and a prepášnik is a rascal.

The Péchy manor house in Hermanovce and the countess who came back to a ruin

The story of this manor house began around 1772, and it’s a love story. František Péchy asked for Barbora Bereczky’s hand, and she sent word that she’d gladly come, but he was to build her a new manor house, and not down by the stream but up on the hill. He had the old one demolished and built the new one on the hill. When he died, she had a gloriette built over his grave, an ornamental tomb you’ll hardly find anywhere else in Slovakia, and 29 years later she was buried in the crypt beneath it, next to him.

The 20th century was far crueller to the family. The last owner, György Péchy, was taken to forced labour in the Soviet Union in 1945 and died there. His wife was allowed to live in part of the manor house until 1948. After that it housed a school, and the manor house gradually became a ruin without windows or doors. In 1997, after years in Switzerland, their granddaughter Klára Szakall von Losoncz came to have a look and decided to save the ruin. For the next ten years she flew in once a month for 72 hours, carrying 10 litres of flammable paint stripper in her hand luggage, because chemicals like that couldn’t be bought here back then. Of all the original furnishings, only three things eventually turned up in the attic: a family photograph, half a plate from 1848 and a single fork.

The estate isn’t run as a regular visitor attraction, so you need to arrange a tour in advance, usually by staying in the Hunting Lodge (Lovecký dom) guesthouse. I’m working on the full interview with her, and on the answer to why manor houses in Slovakia are falling into ruin.

Kamenica Castle and other ruins above the Upper Torysa

If you get hooked on collecting ruins, Šariš has plenty to choose from. From the donjon of Šariš Castle you can see six at once, and you can walk up to most of them.

Kamenica Castle (Kamenický hrad) above the Upper Torysa valley (Horná Torysa) is one of those the locals recommended to me, along with Hanigovce Castle (Hanigovský hrad). I didn’t make it to either, so I’m saving them for next time.

Why individuals are saving the historic buildings of Šariš

When I went through my notes after a week, one pattern jumped out. Behind every historic building saved in Šariš there’s a specific person who decided not to let it fall. A caver who built a path for 35 years. A village that bought a manor house knowing it didn’t have the money to finish the job. A woman who came back from abroad to the ruin her grandparents left behind. A family who got a chairlift from 1983 running again. A teacher who spent his life recording village folklore so that someone could hear it 50 years later.

Šariš used to be rich, because a north-south trade route ran through the Torysa valley. That’s why there are so many castles and manor houses here. When the trade routes moved, the money left and the buildings stayed. Today Šariš has more historic buildings than the region can afford to keep up, and that’s the whole answer to why half of them look the way they do. It’s not a lack of interest. It’s maths.

There’s one thing I disagree with the locals on, though. I heard several times that promotion makes no sense, that after a big campaign eleven people came in two days, and that the only thing that works is a happy customer. I understand that, but it doesn’t add up. My post about the cave near Lipovce was seen by half a million people, and dozens of them wrote to tell me they’d had no idea the place existed and were going to go. It’s not that promotion doesn’t work. It’s about who does it, and whether the person talking about a place is someone people trust.

Bardejov and Bardejovské Kúpele

The north of the region deserves an article of its own, because Bardejov is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the spa town of Bardejovské Kúpele works by a completely different logic from the rest of Šariš. There’s an open-air museum, a colonnade with eight springs, town walls, a Jewish suburbium and a town that in the 15th century was among the richest in the Kingdom of Hungary. If you’re planning a trip to Šariš, I’d add these two places, and I’ve written up Bardejov and the spa in a separate article.

Happy travels!
Milan Bez Mapy

This trip was made with financial support from the Ministry of Tourism and Sport of the Slovak Republic.