For many travellers, a Tuzla itinerary begins at Tuzla Airport and ends with a quick search for the fastest road to Sarajevo. That is understandable, but it is also a fine way to miss one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s most varied corners. Northeast Bosnia packs salt water, medieval stone, river landscapes and some of the country’s most important places of memory into distances that look deceptively small on a map.

Bosnia and Herzegovina has plenty of places that are beautiful in the normal, easy-to-explain sense. There are old towns, mountain roads, riverside cafés and viewpoints where you take a photograph, send it to someone back home and receive the expected reply: “That looks lovely.” Then there are places that do something slightly different. If you are searching for places to visit in Bosnia that feel genuinely different from the usual European city break, the country gets interesting very quickly.