Members of Šibenik FC on a boat excursion to the Torak Lake spring

Members of Šibenik FC on a boat excursion to the Torak Lake spring

Getting to know the Krka from the water perpective

Šibenik Croatian Football Club is a club with a tradition extending back more than 90 years. The club currently plays in the highest Croatian football league, and we were delighted to host the players at Krka National Park, so that they could get to know the Krka from another perspective – from the water.

A boat excursion from Skradinski buk through the Čikola Canyon towards Torak Lake was a perfect opportunity to spend time with the players, and for them to see first-hand the fascinating beauty that two powerful rivers, the Krka and Čikola have been creating for millennia. When the powerful travertine barrier of Skradinski buk was formed, the Krka River formed a lake-like section to Visovac, fully submerging the mouth of the Čikola River. And this is how Croatia’s most unusual confluence landscape came to be.

The Krka River is separated from the mouth of the Čikola River by Kalički Busen, a tufa barrier about 700 metres long and just 10 metres wide. At this site, for thousands of years, the moment is continually repeated in which the Čikola River, after travelling through a narrow canyon, spreads out wide and hurls itself into the embrace of the Krka River, only to flow together towards Skradinki buk, Europe’s longest tufa barrier.

In the midst of the magical confluence of these two rivers is Torak, a lake-shaped spring. Though it is a spring, due to its round shape it resembles a lake, and so we call it a lake spring. The diameter is 150 metres, and the depth is 300 metres. The spring is found on the bottom of the lake. This karst spring is impressive in its beauty due to the unusual position and characteristic plant world of the grasslands and shrubs surrounding it.