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Top cities and UNESCO World Heritage Sites in North Macedonia.
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1
Ohrid
A town of terracotta roofs stacked above a lake three million years old — one of the oldest and deepest in Europe, and home to species found nowhere else. It once claimed 365 churches, one for every day, and the survivors include Sveti Jovan Kaneo perched on a bluff over the water in what is probably the most photographed view in the country.
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2
Skopje
A capital rebuilt twice over: once by Kenzo Tange's master plan after the 1963 earthquake flattened it, then again by the Skopje 2014 project that filled the centre with neoclassical facades and outsized statuary. Cross the 15th-century Stone Bridge and the argument resolves itself in the Old Bazaar, the largest in the Balkans outside Istanbul.
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3
Matka Canyon
Half an hour from Skopje the Treska river narrows into a gorge walled by limestone, with a dam at one end and kayaks on the green water. Vrelo Cave beneath it is among the deepest underwater caves anywhere, and its floor has still not been reached.
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4
Bitola
Once the Ottoman Empire's second city and thick with foreign consulates, which is why locals still call it the city of consuls and why Shirok Sokak is lined with fin-de-siècle facades. The Roman ruins of Heraclea Lyncestis sit on the edge of town, floored with some of the finest early Christian mosaics in the Balkans.
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5
Mavrovo National Park
The country's largest protected area, wrapped around an artificial lake with a half-submerged church standing in the shallows. In winter it is North Macedonia's main ski resort; the rest of the year it is bears, wolves and the Radika river valley.
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6
Struga
Where the Black Drin river leaves Lake Ohrid, giving the town a waterfront on both. Every August the Struga Poetry Evenings bring poets from across the world to read from the bridge, a tradition running since 1961.
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7
Sveti Naum
A monastery founded in 905 on a headland at the lake's southern end, a few hundred metres from the Albanian border. Peacocks wander the grounds, springs feed the lake through a reed bed reached by rowing boat, and Naum himself is buried in the church — put your ear to the tomb and people will tell you his heart is still beating.
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8
Galičica National Park
The ridge separating Lake Ohrid from Lake Prespa, with a road along the top that delivers both lakes in a single view. Its isolation has left it with endemic plants found on this mountain and nowhere else on earth.
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9
Tetovo
Home to the Šarena Džamija, the Painted Mosque, whose exterior is covered in floral and geometric panels quite unlike anything else in Ottoman architecture. Above the town the Arabati Baba Teḱe is one of the best-preserved dervish lodges in Europe.
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10
Kruševo
The highest town in the country at 1,350 metres, and the seat of the ten-day Kruševo Republic proclaimed during the 1903 Ilinden uprising. The Makedonium monument above it — a white concrete pod studded with round windows — is the most striking piece of Yugoslav-era memorial architecture in North Macedonia.
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11
Prilep
A town under a hillside of enormous rounded granite boulders, crowned by Markovi Kuli, the fortress of the folk-hero King Marko. It has been the centre of Macedonian tobacco for a century, and the smell of it still hangs around the old town in curing season.
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12
Stobi
The Roman city that grew where the Crna joins the Vardar, later a bishopric substantial enough to send a delegate to the Council of Nicaea. Its theatre, basilicas and mosaic floors are the most complete classical site in the country.
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13
Pelister National Park
The oldest national park in North Macedonia, declared in 1948, built around Baba mountain and two glacial tarns known as Pelister's Eyes. Its molika pine forests are a five-needled relict species that survives in only a handful of Balkan ranges.
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14
Kratovo
Built inside the crater of an extinct volcano and threaded with stone bridges over ravines, the town kept six of its medieval defensive towers. The hills around it are riddled with the Roman and Ottoman mine shafts that paid for them.
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15
Vevčani
A village of spring-fed streams below Mount Jablanica that declared itself a republic in 1991 and printed its own currency, which it still sells to visitors. Its January carnival is pagan in origin and unsparing in its satire of whoever is currently in power.
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16
Kokino
A Bronze Age site on a volcanic ridge where carved stone markers align with the sun and moon at solstice and equinox, in use around 1800 BC. NASA once listed it among the world's oldest observatories, which the country has never stopped mentioning.
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17
Tikveš Wine Region
The largest wine region in the Balkans, running along the Vardar south of Negotino and Kavadarci, planted heavily with the indigenous Vranec. Wine has been made here since Roman times, and the bigger estates now open their cellars to visitors.
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18
Strumica
A southeastern town best known for two things: a pre-Lenten carnival with masked processions that has run for well over a century, and peppers. The ones grown around here are held to make the country's finest ajvar, which is a serious claim locally.
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19
Popova Šapka
A ski area on the Šar Mountains above Tetovo, at 1,700 metres, better known among freeriders than on any piste map. The off-piste terrain and long spring season draw ski tourers from well outside the region.
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20
Lake Dojran
A shallow lake on the Greek border where fishermen still work with cormorants, driving fish into reed traps in a technique recorded since antiquity. It is the warmest of the country's three big lakes and the least visited by foreigners.
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21
Berovo
A quiet town in the Maleševo mountains near the Bulgarian border, ringed by pine forest and known for its lake, its sheep cheese and its woodcarving. It is where Macedonians go when they want nothing to happen for a few days.
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22
Veles
A steep town stacked along the Vardar gorge, and the birthplace of the poet Koco Racin, whose name it briefly carried. The hillside cemetery and the Church of St Panteleimon look straight down over the river and the railway.