Anja, Ezavod
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Slovenia Green Gourmet Route
The Slovenia Green Gourmet Route is a sustainable culinary tourism product combining cycling, green-certified destinations, restaurants, vineyards, farm stays and local food stories. It passes through Slovenia Green destinations and encourages slow, low-carbon travel with gastronomic stops.
The route is especially relevant because it turns sustainability into a concrete visitor experience: cycling, rail connections, rural areas, food producers, wine regions and certified destinations.
It is the perfect itinerary for rapidly evolving world travelers who demand everything: pleasure, adventure, and responsibility. Combining food, Slovenia Green-certified destinations, beautiful and varied landscapes, challenging and safe cycling, and “the world’s most sustainable country,” the SGGR has something for everyone but never forgets its roots — the communities scattered across this beautiful and magnificent Central European nation.
The route, which only visits green-certified destinations, crisscrosses nearly all of Slovenia, which was named the European Region of Gastronomy for 2021. The path provides all the information cyclists need to discover Slovenia along forest roads and quaint streets. The Green Gourmet Route makes food and wine a top priority and visits Michelin-starred restaurants (Michelin awarded Slovenia its first stars in 2020), great local bistros, farmers, and wineries.
Piran salt and the salt-worker tradition (https://www.kpss.si/en)
Piran salt is one of the clearest Slovenian links to Mediterranean food heritage. The Sečovlje and Strunjan salt pans preserve the centuries-old life and work of salt workers on the north-eastern Adriatic. Traditional manual harvesting is still maintained, and Slovenia promotes this as both natural and cultural heritage.
For millennia, the River Dragonja has deposited debris and created a marsh that moves the indistinct land-sea interface from the interior of the valley towards the Gulf of Piran. People soon realised that they could not farm in the marsh and the salty soil, but that they could extract salt. This created an extraordinary place and an authentic way of living and working in harmony with nature that continues to this day.
The Saltworks Museum is located in the Sečovlje salt pans, in the abandoned Fontanigge area by the Giassi Canal, and comprises four restored saltworks houses, one of which was used for salt storage in the post-war period, while the other three were used as living quarters for the saltworks families on the first floor. Today, they house the museum’s contents, which show the history of the salt pans and the way of life and work of the salt workers through artefacts, written and pictorial sources. A restored salt fund is also on display in front of the houses.
Slovenia does not have one single national programme branded exactly as “Mediterranean Diet”, but several initiatives are strongly aligned with it.
1.Dober tek, Slovenija – National Programme on Nutrition and Physical Activity for Health 2015–2025.This is Slovenia’s main public-health umbrella programme for improving dietary and physical activity habits. NIJZ explicitly links it to reducing obesity and chronic diseases connected with poor diet and inactivity.
2.Together for Health / Skupaj za zdravje.
This is a nationwide primary-care prevention programme available to adults in Slovenia. It includes preventive examinations, lifestyle-change workshops and one-to-one consultations, with the aim of reducing premature mortality, morbidity and disability linked to chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension and obesity.
3.Prehrana.si national food and nutrition portal.
This portal, run by the Nutrition Institute and NIJZ and co-financed by the Ministry of Health, provides credible public information on healthy nutrition under the framework of the national nutrition and physical activity programme.
4.School food initiatives: School Scheme and Traditional Slovenian Breakfast.
Slovenia has strong school-food infrastructure: school meals, fruit/vegetable/milk schemes, nutrition education, local food-chain awareness and the Traditional Slovenian Breakfast. These are not Mediterranean Diet initiatives in name, but they reinforce core Mediterranean-diet values: regular meals, fruit, vegetables, local food, food literacy and short supply chains.
Food innovation and healthier products.
5.The “Most Innovative Foods” initiative by the Nutrition Institute, supported by the Ministry of Health under Dober tek Slovenija, encourages Slovenian producers to develop foods with better nutritional composition — less salt, sugar and saturated fat, and more vegetables and fibre.Kind regards, Anja
