Palić

Palić isn't a separate trip so much as an extension of Subotica: eight kilometres east, half an hour by bike, ten minutes by car. Everything you come for fits into the lakeside park — the Water Tower, the Great Terrace and the Women's Lido, all from 1912, all by the same architects who built the city its centre.

The spa began in 1845, when the first bathhouse opened, with hot baths added between 1852 and 1854; the park had been planted earlier still, in the early forties. The railway came in 1869 and a station of its own in 1887, and from then on the guests came from Budapest and Vienna, not just Subotica. What you see today went up in a single burst just before the First World War: the Water Tower and its gate, the Great Terrace, the music pavilion, and two separate lidos, men's and women's, divided by the Cape of Love.

The lake is a different story. It runs over eight kilometres long and between three hundred and fifty and eight hundred metres wide, with an average depth of one metre ninety. Eutrophication nearly killed it in 1970, so in 1971 it was drained, the sludge dug out, and the water returned in 1976. After a further clean-up finishing in late 2022 only total phosphorus improved to class three, while the cyanobacteria stayed in class five, so the public health institute still rates the lake class five. Swimming is banned, and no local does it. There is an aqua park, and that is where people swim.

So Palić is best done on wheels. A cycle path runs from Subotica to the lake and then around it, and the distances are such that the full loop takes an hour and a half with stops. Along the way are the zoo, the farmsteads, and the wineries of the Subotica–Horgoš sands — light soil that gives lighter whites and riesling. Most cellars take visitors by appointment only, so the call goes in the day before rather than at the gate. Bikes rent by the day in Subotica and at Palić itself, which works out cheaper than two taxi runs.