A river runs through it

Every country has a fanciful literary claim. Slovenia’s is that Dante found inspiration for The Divine Comedy’s ‘Inferno’ while sitting outside a cave in the Tolminka Gorge, in the enchanting Triglav National Park. Whatever demons the exiled poet might have imagined in the gorge, he could well have pictured ‘Paradiso’ not far away, on a meadowy plateau 900m up in the Prealps on the country’s Italian border.

It was, at least, a vision shared by beatnik couple Katya and Bojan Roš, who reincarnated the plateau eight years ago, transforming it from an old ski resort into a mountainside retreat, calling it ‘Nebesa’, meaning ‘heaven’ in Slovenian. Like most celestial settings, Nebesa has guardian angels, two bear-like Newfoundlands, Pupa and Lola, who lumbered up to greet us when we arrived on a sizzling blue-sky day.

Made up of four chalets and an L-shaped communal area, which houses a wellness centre with a sauna and pool, Nebesa’s layout mirrors that of a traditional mountain hamlet. The chalets, perched neatly in a row overlooking the lush Soca Valley and the rugged peaks of the Julian Alps, have been designed with haylofts in mind, but have all the trappings of an urban studio apartment, including a pair of Crocs (God's answer to comfortable footwear).

Too hot for a sauna and too hungry for a swim, we explored the well-stocked communal larder. There’s no restaurant service at Nebesa but guests can help themselves to the larder’s requisite leg of prosciutto, wheels of mountain cheese and free-flowing local wine. We carried our booty back to our balcony and settled in against a backdrop of shooting stars and mysterious mountain sounds.

However comfortable your hay house, lie-ins are for wimps in the mountains. We woke at five the next morning and began a two-hour ascent to the Planina Matajur, an alpine milking parlour. When we arrived, any sense of smugness at our early start was quickly dispelled by Rok and his three co-workers, who had already milked 54 cows and prepared the day’s first batch of cheese. Rok, who at 25 is the region’s youngest cheesemonger and a local heart-throb, offered us the first of many shots of schnapps: ‘to kill any bacteria and calm the nerves.’ By midday we were part of the team, merrily scrubbing hundreds of wheels of cheese, leaving them out to dry in the blazing sun.

Having made our very small mark on local cheese production, we got to sample more of it that evening. A short drive from Nebesa, down into the Soca Valley, the town of Kobarid is a culinary centre and home to Hiša Franko, Slovenia’s answer to The Fat Duck. The adventurous tasting menu was an ode to local produce. We ate trout from the Soca river and roebuck fillet from the surrounding slopes, which appeared on our plate oozing with chocolate and sage sauce.

Kobarid isn’t just famous for its food. Adventure junkies love the Soca Valley; there is always a flock of colourful paragliders soaring in the sky. We chose to explore the valley from the river, which is such a bright turquoise I actually believed our canoeing guide when he joked that the colour was due to a nearby nuclear power station. Radioactive or not, the water was fast-flowing over rocky stretches, which tested our paddling skills. In gentler stretches we jumped ashore, hurling ourselves off large boulders into the refreshing water.

There may be poetic licence in Dante’s visit to the ravines and plateaux of the Soca Valley, but centuries later Ernest Hemingway did spend time there as an ambulance driver during the First World War. Some of the war’s bloodiest battles were fought along the Soca Front and are described by Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms. Many of the trenches and observation posts have been preserved in outdoor museums, one of which we walked to on our last evening at Nebesa. As we looked out over the intricate network of trenches, bells echoed in the valleys below, and it was hard to fathom that a corner of earthly heaven had witnessed such bloodshed.

The next day we left Nebesa and Katya wished us ‘happy floating’ as we pulled ourselves away from the alpine paradise and, like the paragliders, drifted back to earth.

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