Zeleni Vir Hydroelectric Plant (Munjara)

Below Skrad, where a mountain stream drops over a cliff at Zeleni vir, the water does work before it reaches the valley. Its spring rises in a shallow cave at the foot of the rock face, and that cave holds the intake for a small hydroelectric station that locals call Munjara. Built in 1921, it still generates power a century later.

The plant is a high-pressure diversion station. It takes water from the Curak brook and the Zeleni vir spring and drops it about 50 metres onto two Francis turbines. It is under preventive protection as a cultural monument, valued as old technology and equipment that still operates. It is run by Hrvatska elektroprivreda, the national power company.

The station belongs to a short period when Skrad was a fashionable mountain resort. The Hotel Zeleni vir opened in 1920, and the area around the gorge was opened up with paths in the decades that followed. Electricity from Zeleni vir supplied the surrounding towns, and that made the plant a target in the Second World War. On 11 September 1942 about a thousand Partisans attacked its guard of twenty Home Guard soldiers, captured the station and blew it up, leaving Brod Moravice, Delnice and Skrad without power. It was later rebuilt and returned to service.

What a visitor sees is a modest stone building at the bottom of the valley, the pipework and channels that feed it, and above them the cliff and waterfall of Zeleni vir. The waterfall and the narrow gorge of Vražji prolaz, a cleft of the Jasle stream barely two metres wide with walkways fixed to the rock, were placed under protection as a landscape in 1962. The plant is part of that walk rather than a separate destination.

Because it is an operating power station, the interior is not open to the public; the building is seen from the path. Access to the gorge depends on trail conditions and on the concession holder, and the access road has been under renovation, so check before you go. The plant suits anyone interested in early electrification and industrial history, and it adds a human layer to a walk that is otherwise all rock, water and forest.