Plitviče Lakes, Croatia · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Everyone comes to Plitvičefor the boardwalks that skim across sixteen turquoise lakes and for Veliki Slap, the great waterfall that drops 78 metres at the head of the canyon, and almost nobody realises that the waterfalls here are alive. They are not carved out of the rock the way most falls are, slowly wearing it back. They are built, and they are still being built right now, as you walk past. The barriers that dam one lake from the next are made of tufa, a soft porous stone that grows when moss, algae and tiny bacteria pull dissolved lime out of the water and turn it to rock around themselves.

The whole staircase of lakes is a living thing, adding roughly a centimetre a year, so the Plitviče in this painting is already not quite the Plitvice your grandchildren will see. Here is the part I love. Because the barriers grow at different speeds, they sometimes swallow one another. Around 400 years ago Lake Kozjak was two separate lakes with a waterfall almost 40 metres high tumbling between them, until the barrier downstream grew faster, lifted the water level and quietly drowned that waterfall whole. It is still down there, a great cascade standing silent under the calm green surface the tour boats glide across every day. The guidebooks tell you which entrance to use and where to stand for the best photo. They rarely tell you that the falls are growing as you watch, or that there is a lost waterfall sleeping under the lake.

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.