Questions

Yes, and the reason is density rather than any single famous climb. It's a small, steep, heavily forested country stitched together by quiet country roads, and you can be on alpine passes in the morning and Mediterranean limestone two hours later.

The traffic is the part people notice first. Away from the main valley corridors, you ride for long stretches without meeting a car.

Slovenia is 58% forest — third in the European Union — and managing that much woodland requires roads through it. There are roughly 12,000 kilometres of forest road on top of the public network, and all of it is legally open to cyclists.

None of it was built for recreation, which is what makes it interesting. These roads connect villages, not viewpoints. More on what that's actually like →

May to late October is the core season, and June and September are the best months of the year — stable weather, warm days, cool nights, no crowds.

The high alpine passes open around late spring and stay open into December. The Karst and Vipava in the southwest ride well from March through November, which extends the season at both ends. On a gravel bike, most of the lower country is rideable year-round.

An all-road or fast gravel bike with 38–40 mm tyres covers almost everything here. Paved country roads run into unpaved ones constantly, and a wider tyre means you never have to plan around the surface.

Bring a pure road bike if what you want is the alpine passes and nothing else — that's a legitimate week. The longer answer →

On the paved roads, no. Download a GPX and go — the roads are quiet and you'll have a good week.

Whether you want one is the more interesting question. A local knows which café is open on a Monday, which valley is out of the wind today, which farmhouse will feed eight people at short notice, and which climb to save for the day the light is right. That's the difference between riding through a country and being taken into it.

On the unpaved network it stops being optional. Forest roads branch constantly, they're rarely signed, and a line on a screen can put you at a junction with four identical-looking options. What you're paying for isn't the route — it's knowing which road was logged last month and where to go when the forecast turns.

The secondary and country roads are quiet, and drivers are generally used to cyclists — the country produces a lot of them. The main valley corridors carry real traffic and we route around them.

There's also a growing network of dedicated cycling paths, some of them genuinely spectacular. The new Bled–Bohinj route runs about 28 kilometres almost entirely separated from traffic, and more is being built every year.

Things worth paying attention to: alpine descents in the wet, unlit tunnels on some valley roads, and how fast mountain weather changes.

One local habit — ride single file. Slovenian drivers aren't used to groups riding two abreast and don't take kindly to it. Riding one behind the other keeps everyone comfortable, and it's what we ask groups to do here.

Yes. It's the highest road pass in Slovenia at 1,611 metres, 11.8 kilometres at 6.9% from the Kranjska Gora side, with fifty hairpins across the mountain. It was cut in 1915 by Russian prisoners of war and you pass the chapel they built on the way up.

Normally open from spring through to December. From our base it's a comfortable day.

If you want the full alpine version, add Mangart. At 2,055 metres it's the highest road in Slovenia — a narrow military road cut into the mountain face in the late 1930s, climbing out of Log pod Mangartom through tunnels and rock galleries with the valley falling away beside you. Steep, exposed, and worth every metre.

It's seasonal, roughly June to November, and closed all winter. Ridden in the same week as Vršič it's about as big as Slovenia gets.

Widely, and to a high standard — Slovenia consistently ranks among the strongest non-native English-speaking countries in Europe. You will not have a language problem in hotels, restaurants or bike shops.

Where it helps to have a local is the small mountain hut or farm kitchen, which is usually where you want to be eating. Even then it's rarely a problem — you'll be made welcome long before anyone worries about the language.

Ljubljana Airport is the closest, about 20 minutes from our base, with direct flights from most of Western Europe. Venice, Trieste, Klagenfurt and Zagreb are all within a few hours by road and often cheaper.

Airport transfers aren't included in the trip price. We can send you the local transfer companies we use and trust, or — if the group is arriving together — quote it as an add-on and handle it for you.

Our trips are full board. Every trip includes:

• Accommodation, twin share, in hotels we've chosen and booked ourselves
• Breakfast every day, a restaurant lunch on every riding day, and dinner booked ahead — meals include a soft drink
• Café stops on the road
• Energy snacks and electrolytes
• A local food or drink experience — a cheese tasting, a winery, an apiary, depending on the route
• Route pack with GPX for every ride
• Tourist tax

Guided departures add a UIAA-licensed local guide riding with you every day, mechanical support on the road if you need it, and luggage moved hotel to hotel on point-to-point trips.

Fully supported departures add a support vehicle and driver with you every day, food, drink and electrolytes on the road, and a lift over a climb on the day your legs disagree with you.

Not included: flights, airport transfers, bike hire, single room supplement, alcohol and drinks beyond the set menus, and travel insurance. Transfers and bike hire are add-ons — tell us what you need and we'll quote it.

Exact inclusions vary by trip. Each trip page lists its own.

Yes, and it has to cover cycling. It's mandatory on every trip and it isn't included in the price.

Check the policy specifically rather than assuming — plenty of standard travel policies exclude cycling entirely, or exclude it once you're descending above a certain speed. Read the exclusions before you buy, not after.

No, we don't run our own fleet. We arrange bikes through local partners we've worked with and trust, as an add-on on any trip.

Tell us what you ride at home — size, groupset, tyre width — and we'll match it as closely as the local fleet allows. Most riders bring their own.

Roll out in the morning after a proper breakfast. Ride 70 to 120 kilometres with 1,000 to 1,800 metres of climbing, depending on the day and the group. Always a café stop, and never one chosen at random. A proper lunch. Back in the afternoon with time to shower before dinner.

Days get adjusted at breakfast if the weather or the legs say so. The country is compact enough to make that easy.

If you ride regularly and can do 100 kilometres with 1,200 metres of climbing without it ruining your week, you'll be fine. You don't need to be fast.

The honest version: people usually overestimate what they can repeat five days running. Tell us what you actually ride at home, not what you rode once in June, and we'll build the week around that.

Yes, and most groups are mixed. We build shorter route options into several days, so the riders who want a big day get one and everyone still ends up at the same lunch table.

On fully supported departures there's a vehicle with you, which makes it easier again — a lift over one climb on the day someone's legs have gone isn't a failure, it's the plan working. E-bikes are welcome.

We ride if the weather allows. Like anywhere with mountains, Slovenia gets weather, and a grey day on a quiet forest road is still a good day.

What we can't promise is sunshine. What we can promise is that the day gets rebuilt around whatever the sky is doing — alpine days swapped for lower valleys, gravel swapped for tarmac when the surface turns. And if a day is genuinely unrideable, there's a gorge, a wine cellar and a very good lunch within twenty minutes of most of our routes.

Yes, and it works better here than in most cycling destinations because the good things aren't up the climbs. Bled, Vintgar Gorge, the old town in Radovljica, Ljubljana and the Karst wine country are all reachable without a bike — and the country is small enough that a non-riding day never means a long drive.

That's most of what we do. You bring the clients and own the relationship; we run everything on the ground in Slovenia — routes and GPX, guiding, hotels, transfers, luggage, bike hire, restaurants and on-the-road support.

One contact for the whole country instead of a fixer in every region. How we work with operators →

Yes. Some operators take the full ground package, some only want guiding and route design, some only the hotels and transfers.

We also design new routes and build trips from scratch — if you have an idea for Slovenia and no way to test it, that's a good conversation. More →

Yes. We have direct relationships with the hotels we use and we book with them ourselves rather than going through a bed bank.

We take provisional room blocks once a group is real and confirm when you do, so neither of us carries inventory risk on a trip that hasn't sold. Deposit and cancellation terms are on our terms page.

All of them. The Julian Alps and Karavanke, the Soča valley, Brda and Vipava, the Karst, Logarska and the Kamnik–Savinja Alps, the Istrian coast, and east into Štajerska, Dolenjska and the forests of Kočevje.

Our signature trip, Alps to Adriatic, runs Kranjska Gora to the sea in a week. See the trips →

Home Ground Slovenia is a cycling company based in Radovljica, in the Upper Carniola region near Bled. We plan and run road and gravel cycling trips across the country — routes, guiding, accommodation, transfers, bikes and the local logistics that make a week work.

We work two ways. International cycling tour operators use us as their Slovenian ground partner, so they have one contact instead of five. Private groups come to us directly.

It means two things at once, and we chose it for both. Home ground is territory you know intimately — every road, which café is open on a Monday, where the surface changes after rain. It's also where you welcome people in.

That's the business. We're not showing you Slovenia. We're taking you out on the roads we ride after work and at weekends with our friends.

Aljaž Urbanc. A UIAA-licensed guide who has been riding these roads for over a decade, with a background in marketing and the outdoor sports industry, and who guided groups here for years before this became a company.

Trips are led by him or by local guides he rides with personally. There is no pool of freelancers who have never met.

Aljaž lives in Radovljica, in the Sava valley between the Karavanke and the Julian Alps. Ljubljana Airport is about 20 minutes away and Bled seven kilometres.

Trips run from Žirovnica, six kilometres up the valley — that's the home base. The Karavanke rise directly behind the villages, the Julian Alps sit across the water, and you can ride onto both from the front door without loading a van.

Point-to-point trips like Alps to Adriatic start in Kranjska Gora and finish on the Adriatic.

Fit recreational cyclists who take the riding seriously but aren't racing. People who want a proper day on the bike — 70 to 120 kilometres, real climbs, honest effort — and also want the coffee stop, the lunch, the local wine and the company.

Aljaž calls them social riders. Not people chasing Strava KOMs, but people who care who they're riding with, what they see along the way, and how they're treated — which is to say, as friends rather than clients.

If you measure a holiday in watts, we're the wrong company. If you measure it in the ride, the meal afterwards and who you rode it with, you're in the right place.