The Tara River Canyon (Serbian: Kanjon Tara), also known as the Tara River Gorge, is the longest canyon in Serbia and Europe and the second-longest in the world. It is 82 kilometers long and is 1,300 meters at its deepest. The canyon is protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and is a part of Tara national park. The Tara River cuts through the canyon. The Tara canyon, unique in its depth of usually thousand meters, someplace even a thousand and three hundred meters deep, is placed right behind the Grand Canyon in Arizona, USA. Tara, at its end making confluence with Piva, and giving birth to Drina, is some hundred and fifty kilometers long. In its part through The National Park Tara, Tara has a mean fall of 3.6 meters/kilometer, making a host of waterfalls and cascades possible, thus creating with its uniqueness The Serbian Colorado.

All along its flow, Tara gets large quantities of water from numerous sources, and quite a few tributaries. The most important tributaries on the left Tara side are Ljutica and Susica, and the most important tributaries from the right side being Vaskovaska rijeka and Draga. The most important source is the source Bajlovica sige, a source placed on the left bank of the Tara river giving to the Tara a few hundred liters per second, where the water sourcing from the Bucevica cave falls into the Tara more than thirty meters high, and more than a hundred and fifty meters bright. Very special are the Tara cascades. The roar from the cascades is heard on the very peaks of the canyon. There are more than forty cascades, the most famous being: Djavolje lazi, Sokolovina, Bijeli kamen, Gornji tepacki buk, Donji tepacki buk etc. Because of the quality of its water, and because of its unique ecological system, Tara in 1977 was put into the programme “Covek i biosfera” (Men and Biosphere) and inscribed into the ecological biosphere reservations of the World, being thus protected under an internationally issued convention.

There are rocky and pebbly terraces, sandy beaches, high cliffs, and more than 80 large caves along the canyon.

The canyon is part of the Tara River rafting route. The one day rafting route, from Brstnovica to Sćepan Polje is 18km long and it takes 2 to 3 hours. This part of the canyon is the most exciting because the river has the biggest drop in elevation in the shortest length. There are 21 out of 50 rapids in this part of the Tara. The rapids are Brstanovići, Pećine, the very dangerous Celije rapids and Vjernovički rapids.

The Bosnian and the Montenegrin government had plans to flood the Tara Gorge, with the construction of a hydroelectric dam in the Drina River. However, it abandoned this plan in April, 2005 after several successful protests of advocates for the preservation of the canyon. But, in September 2006, a protocol for cooperation between Slovenian company "Petrol" and Montenegrin company "Montenegro-bonus" was signed, and the building of an electric plant with initial power of 40 or 60 megawatts is planned, despite all efforts to protect the gorge.

credited to wikipedia and flickr: Serg, Kristina and Nikolai