Everyone means the Tolmin water when they say they have fished the Soča, and this is the other one — the twenty-five kilometres above it, from the bridge at Trenta down to the bridge at Čezsoča, managed not by a fishing club but by the national Fisheries Research Institute. That sounds bureaucratic and turns out to matter: it is a research water as much as a fishery, run for marble trout, and the permits are priced accordingly. The river up here is younger and colder than at Tolmin, running over white limestone in that improbable turquoise you will assume has been exaggerated in the photographs until you stand in it. Fly only, and mostly fished by sight — you find a fish, you think about it for a while, you make one cast instead of twenty. Grayling in the slower glides below Soča village, rainbows here and there from an older stocking habit. Late spring, then September once the meltwater has finished and the fish settle.

• River
• Limestone