Igman: Sarajevo's Olympic plateau, visited properly

Getting to know the plateau

Igman is the forested mountain and plateau immediately southwest of Sarajevo, reached in about 40 minutes and 25 km from the city centre via Hrasnica and Ilidža. It tops out around 1,500 m, low enough to be green and walkable through most of the year, high enough that the air is noticeably cooler and clearer than the city’s own vehicles and heating leave it, particularly welcome on the days when Sarajevo’s winter air quality is at its worst.

Unlike Trebević, which has a cable car and can be done as a half-day from central Sarajevo without a car, Igman needs your own wheels or a booked tour. There is no scheduled bus service onto the plateau. That single fact shapes most of what follows: Igman rewards people who arrive with a car, a 4x4 tour, or a hiking guide, and it is a poor fit for anyone relying on trams and city buses. If you are without a car, see day trips without a car for what is realistically reachable instead, or book a guided run that includes the transport.

The 1984 Olympics on Igman

Igman hosted three of the six competition venues for the 1984 Winter Olympics: the ski jumping hills, the cross-country skiing courses, and the biathlon range, all centred on the open ground at Veliko Polje. Bjelašnica took the men’s alpine events, Jahorina the women’s, and Trebević the bobsleigh and luge, but Igman carried the largest share of the Nordic programme.

The two jump towers still stand at Veliko Polje, unused since the war years and now weathered and partly overgrown rather than restored or demolished. There is no ticket booth, no interpretation panel explaining what you are looking at, and no barrier keeping you at a distance the way a managed heritage attraction would. It is simply Olympic infrastructure left where it was built, standing in a mountain meadow that has otherwise reverted to grazing and walking. The flatter ground around it, where the cross-country and biathlon courses ran, is easy underfoot and makes for the simplest walking on the whole plateau.

Photographers and anyone interested in the aftermath of the 1984 Games tend to find Veliko Polje the single most rewarding stop on Igman. It sits alongside the abandoned bobsleigh track on Trebević as one of the two places around Sarajevo where the physical legacy of the Olympics is most visible and least explained.

The wartime mountain track

Before the Tunnel of Hope was dug under the airport runway in 1993, the forest track across Igman’s slopes was, for a period, the only way to move people and supplies between besieged Sarajevo and territory held outside the siege lines. It was a rough mountain road and, in places, little more than a path, used at real risk: sections lay within range of positions on the surrounding high ground, and the route was exhausting and dangerous in all seasons, worse in winter.

This is not developed as a memorial site. There is no museum building, no marked heritage trail, and no signage set up to guide visitors along the route the way there is at the tunnel itself in Butmir. What remains is the forest road, still used today by walkers, cyclists, and 4x4 tours, largely indistinguishable at a glance from any other mountain track in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Visiting Igman with this history in mind is worthwhile, but it calls for restraint rather than a search for evidence: there is little to photograph that would mean anything without the context, and the plateau today functions as a hiking area, not a site to be toured for its wartime past. For visitors who want the fuller picture of how the siege was endured and broken, the tunnel museum at Butmir and the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the city give that context properly; Igman itself gives you the terrain.

Walking today: Veliko Polje and Mrazišta

The two easiest, most established areas for a short walk on Igman are Veliko Polje and Mrazišta, a stretch of open highland meadow nearby. Both sit on well-used tracks and forest roads, are gently graded, and can be covered in anything from an hour to half a day depending on how far you want to range. Neither requires technical hiking experience or specialist gear beyond sturdy shoes and a layer against the wind, which picks up on the open plateau even on a warm day in the valley below.

These two areas are the sensible limit for an independent, unguided walk. They are close to the road, well trodden, and free of any ambiguity about where the path runs. For anything further into the forest or off the main tracks, the picture changes, and that is worth stating plainly before anyone sets off.

Where the marked trails end: landmines

Bosnia and Herzegovina still has areas of suspected landmine contamination left over from the 1992 to 1995 war, and the slopes around Igman, including ground away from the cleared paths used during and since the Olympics, are among them. This is not a reason to avoid Igman; it is a reason to stay disciplined about where you walk.

The rule is simple and worth repeating on every page about hiking here: never leave a marked trail, a signed footpath, or a driveable forest road, whatever the terrain looks like underfoot. Respect any yellow or red hazard markers you see without exception, and if you want to go beyond the well-used routes around Veliko Polje and Mrazišta, do it with a guide who knows the ground, not by following an unmarked track because it looks passable. See landmine safety while hiking in Bosnia for the fuller version of this before planning anything more ambitious than the routes described here.

On to Bjelašnica and Lukomir

A single road climbs from Igman’s plateau over the saddle toward the slopes of Bjelašnica and continues to the turn-off for Lukomir, the highest permanently inhabited village in the country at around 1,469 m. This is the standard way most visitors see all three in one outing: Igman in the morning for Veliko Polje and a short walk, then on to Bjelašnica’s ridge, finishing at Lukomir or the nearby village of Umoljani for lunch and the view into the Rakitnica canyon.

The road is manageable in an ordinary rental car in dry summer conditions but becomes genuinely rough beyond Bjelašnica, and the final approach to Lukomir is an unpaved piste that many self-drivers find more comfortable left to a 4x4 tour, particularly outside the height of summer. See the Lukomir hike guide and Bjelašnica and Umoljani as a day trip for what each stage actually involves.

Getting there and moving around

From Sarajevo centre	Distance	Driving time
Igman (Veliko Polje)	~25 km	~40 minutes
Igman to Bjelašnica saddle	~10 km further	~20 minutes
Igman to Lukomir turn-off	~35 km further	~1 hour (final stretch unpaved)

There is no scheduled public transport onto the plateau. Realistic options are a rental car (see car rental in Sarajevo), a taxi arranged for the return leg, or a guided 4x4 tour that also takes care of navigation on the rougher stretches toward Lukomir. Anyone without a car and short on time is better served by choosing a tour that already covers Igman as one stop among several, rather than trying to reach the plateau independently.

Tours that include Igman

A handful of guided options run out of Sarajevo and cover Igman alongside its neighbours, useful if you would rather not drive the rougher stretches yourself or want the wartime and Olympic context explained on the ground.

a guided day combining Igman, the Bjelašnica ridge and Umoljani village covers the same ground described above in one organised trip. For a broader mountain circuit, a 4x4 tour linking Igman, Trebević and Lukomir village adds the abandoned bobsleigh track to the same day. Visitors more interested in the wartime route specifically can look at a guided tour pairing Mount Igman with the Tunnel of Hope, which sets the mountain track and the tunnel museum side by side with a guide to explain both. For the fuller push out to the highlands, a 4x4 route from Igman through Lukomir village to Boračko Lake extends the day as far as the lake near Konjic.

When to go

Igman is walkable from spring through autumn, with May to June and September into early October giving the most comfortable temperatures on an exposed plateau. July and August are warm but rarely uncomfortable at this altitude, a genuine relief from the 30 to 35 degree heat that settles into the Sarajevo valley in high summer. Winter brings snow and closes off casual walking beyond the cleared road, though the plateau’s edges connect into the wider skiing area shared with Bjelašnica; see skiing near Sarajevo for where the lifts actually operate today, since Igman’s own Nordic infrastructure at Veliko Polje has not run commercially since the war.

A half-day plan

For a self-driven half-day: leave Sarajevo by mid-morning, reach Veliko Polje inside 40 minutes, spend an hour or two walking around the jump towers and out toward Mrazišta on the marked tracks, then either return to the city for the afternoon or continue over the saddle toward Bjelašnica if you have a full day and a suitable vehicle.

Combine it with a stop at Vrelo Bosne in Ilidža on the way out or back, since the source of the Bosna sits directly on the route between Sarajevo and Igman and adds very little driving time. For a wider view of what a longer stay in the mountains around Sarajevo can look like, the four-day Sarajevo itinerary sets Igman alongside Bjelašnica, Lukomir and a day in the city itself.

Igman rarely tops a first-time visitor’s list, and that is roughly right: it is not a single dramatic sight but a plateau that rewards a few unhurried hours, best understood alongside its neighbours rather than on its own. Go for the jump towers at Veliko Polje, the easy walking, and the road on to Bjelašnica and Lukomir; keep the wartime history in mind without treating the mountain as a site built to explain it; and stay on the marked paths throughout.