Award-winning filmmaker and BBC correspondent Nick Thorpe explores the Carpathians, Europe’s “secret mountains” — a wild landscape scarred by conflict yet little known to outsiders. Spanning Ukraine, Romania, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary, the range shelters Europe’s last primeval forests and its largest populations of bears and wolves. In six hour-long episodes across four seasons, the series portrays both breathtaking beauty and urgent struggles: war’s impact on villages, oligarchs’ mega ski plans, and Transylvania’s vanishing beech forests. Along the way we meet shepherds, beekeepers, winemakers, draft-dodgers and rafters, as well as mayors and activists fighting over land and wildlife. Echoing classic travel journals, Nick’s odyssey starts and ends in Ukraine, far from battlefronts, revealing ancient customs and rituals that endure amid wild flowers, wild animals and the encroaching modern world, in Europe’s Secret Mountains.