Dragonia river flows along the border of Croatia. The left side is in Croatia, the right in Slovenia. In a first overview, it doesn’t seam to be so important. Same landforms, same vegetation, a river flow that have been moved recently and several roads link the two countries. 
However, a second examination gives me a different impression. Some casinos recently build in the two countries from each side of the border. Important extensions at the check point that demonstrate that this border is taking more importance than in the past. 
I remembered my last travel in Croatia ten years ago, when I crossed this same border rather without any consciousness that I was going from one country to another one. And a third exploration on the field permit me to discover border guards watching this limit all along the time , some little tracks that ended against the channel without any bridge. Not any violence, not any shocking spectacular views. Only a discrete and strange impression of a gap increasing between the two countries like two continents deriving. Certainly the landforms have helped me to think about this metaphor. The valley seams to have enforced a structural break. As in Somalia, where a future ocean is starting in the Affar and Issa basin even if no sea is still arrived, a hard frontier is uprising without any noise and visible disturbance. But the political and socio-economical separation between two worlds exists in this landscape, even if this scenery is so romantic, so Mediterranean, so peaceful. 
The Shengen’s territory has here a concrete reality and creates an artificial barrier that passed rather at the same place that this geomorphologic break. Today, the Europe ends at Dragonia river and this landscape express better than a long speech what does that mean to be inside or outside of it. If it takes a short time for Croatia to enter in , the gap won’t have time to go deeper and this impression will have been a bad dream. If not …. But it’s not any more landscape study it’s policy.
