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Travel destinations , 0 Comments Sep 06, 2017

Prokletije, also known as the Accursed Mountains, is a mountain range on the western Balkan peninsula, extending from northern Albania to Kosovo and eastern Montenegro.

The Prokletije mountains, the southernmost part of the Dinaric Alps, stretch more than 40 miles from Skadar Lake along the Montenegrin–Albanian border in the southwest to Kosovo in the northeast. The Prokletije are a subrange of the 1,000 km (621 mi) long Dinaric Alps. The Prokletije are a typical high mountain range with a pronounced steep topography and glacial features.

The erosion of the Prokletije mountains by glaciers left many telltale features behind. Deep river canyons and flat valleys wind around the ridges of the mountains. Valleys common at lower altitudes are also found at the alpine level, creating mountain passes and valley troughs.

The Prokletije include many of the important rivers of the southeastern part of the Western Balkans. Rivers in this range fall roughly into two main categories, those that flow into the Lim and those that enter the White Drin and meet the Black Drin downstream at the Drin confluence. The southern and eastern slopes of Prokletije fall into the latter category. The Tara and Lim rivers, two major sources of the Dinaric river system, originate on the northern borders of the Prokletije. As a tributary of the Drina it drains into the Danube and then into the Black Sea. The Lim flows through the Plav lake.

There are about 20 small alpine lakes of glacial origin in the Prokletije. The largest lake is Lake Plav in Montenegro. The lake lies at an altitude of 906 meters above sea level in the Plav valley, nestled between the Prokletije and the Visitor range. The surface area of Lake Plav is 1.99 square kilometers and it extends north-south for some 2,160 meters.

Large mammal species that have long been extinct in other regions are found here, such as the Eurasian brown bear, grey wolf, red fox, European wildcat, roe deer, fallow deer, red deer, wild boar and European otter. The highly endangered Balkan lynx, a subspecies of the Eurasian lynx, is mainly found in the Thethi National Park where about roughly 20-50 individuals still roam, though poaching is still a large threat.

The Montenegrin part of the Prokletije range was declared a national park in 2009, comprising an area of 16.000 hectares.