Join us as we visit Lake Bled in this travel guide as a day trip from Ljubljana, Slovenia where we cover the top things to do in Lake Bled including visiting the castle by foot and island by boat trip. Just slightly over an hour by bus and roughly 45 minutes by car Lake Bled is easily accessible from Ljubljana.

With most attractions clustered around the lake a perfect way to spend a day visiting Lake Bled is to walk around the lake, visit Bled Castle, eat local cake and have a leisurely lunch along with taking a boat trip out to the island. All of this can be done in a day allowing you to return to Ljubljana in the early evening.

Let's find out what makes Lake Bled one of the most popular day trips for visitors traveling in Slovenia.

Lake Bled in other languages:

Slovenian: blejsko jezero - blejski grad - blejski otok
German: bleder see - veldeser see - burg veldes

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Lake Bled Travel Guide | Day Trip from Ljubljana, Slovenia Video Transcript:

Lake Bled is probably the most popular day trip you can take from Ljubljana. This is a lake that sits on the Julian Alps, and in the middle of the lake you have a small island with a church - it’s about as picturesque as it gets and it draws massive crowds, but first, the journey there.

Bled Castle is a medieval castle that was built on a cliff rising 130 meters over Lake Bled. According to written sources, this is the oldest castle in Slovenia, first being mentioned in a document from the year 1011. The castle is set up around two courtyards which are connected with a staircase. Once you’re there, you can visit the chapel, check out some of the exhibits, watch a demonstration at the castle forge, or eat at the castle coffee shop or restaurant.

After the castle visit, we hiked back down and started our walk along Lake Bled because we were still feeling pretty stuffed from lunch. Little did we know this would take us several hours to complete.

After eating our slice of Bled Cream Cake, or Kremsnita, it was finally time to arrange a boat ride to Bled Island. While you can rent your own row boat to take out on the island, we chose to pay the 14 Euros per person to have someone else do the hard work. However, if you’re with a group of friends or travelling with family, it’s definitely cheaper to just rent a boat and row it yourself.

Bled Island is very small and it got pretty crowded even though it was low season. Forty minutes turned out to be plenty of time to climb up, have a look around, and enjoy some ice cream.

Now one last piece of advice: we visited in the off-season and at the end of the day, we found out there were not enough buses to transport everyone from Lake Bled back to Ljubljana.

We weren’t able to get on one bus because it was full, so we waited an hour and a half for the next one. By then, more day-trippers like us had gathered, and once again, not everyone could get on the bus, leaving a lot of people stranded, having to find a taxi or other alternative.

There was a lot of pushing and shoving, and many visitors with prepaid tickets were visibly upset.

Because our bus was full, this also meant that even though there were several scheduled stops on the way back to Ljubljana, we couldn’t pick up any passengers along the way, many of them who had been waiting for hours.

Lake Bled has experienced a boom in tourism, but the infrastructure to transport people hasn’t quite caught up yet. After a nice day visiting Bled, getting out of there proved to be very chaotic and stressful. Hopefully things will change in the future, but until then, know that leaving at the end can be tricky.

This is part of our Travel in Slovenia video series showcasing Slovenian food, Slovenian culture and Slovenian cuisine.

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