Hooray, It's that time of year again... Welcome to the Best of 2025! 

Get ready to enjoy and celebrate all the wonders that this fabulous city has to offer. We all have our favourite spots to hang out in, to shop, to wine and dine, get a cultural fix, or learn new skills, and through our annual 'Best of' competition you, our dear readers, get to have a say in who wins the crown for each of our categories.

We've been running 'Best of Ljubljana' since 2011 (yikes, has it really been that long?) and each year the competition gets tougher and the categories grow stronger. It's a busy but fabulous time of year for us at HQ, you can read more about how it all got started below. Last year we included a 'Best of Slovenian Speakers' category, which was a huge success, and one we are continuing this year. The competition concluded when we hosted a whole-day event where the cream of the crop of Slovenian speakers took to the stage and showed us why their voices deserved to be heard. The latter part of the day saw awards presented to all our category winners, special guest speakers and some amazing entertainment. It will be a tough act to follow, but we're working hard to bring you another fabulous competition and introduce you to some very worthy nominees for the following categories.
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This year's categories for Ljubljana are:

Best of Ljubljana Restaurants
Best of Ljubljana Leisure
Best of Ljubljana Christmas

And a further six categories for Slovenia:

Best of Speakers
Best of Experiences
Best of Shopping
Best of Culture
Best Photo
Best Person

Each of these will then be divided into a number of subcategories to try to cover all corners of entertainment and activities and anything else that deserves to be included!

Public voting runs from October to December, with each main category open for two weeks. Results will be announced and published online following an awards ceremony in January, where we can personally thank and congratulate all our well-deserved winners. Click here to see all winners and photos from 2024.

Watch this space because voting for Best of Ljubljana Culture begins on Monday 2 October!

The results are permanently visible on our website. If you have any questions about any of the competitions or would like to learn more about taking part, you can contact us at ljubljana@inyourpocket.com.

History of Best of Ljubljana
What started as a one-off competition for our own amusement (and love of alliteration) with the Battle of the Burek back in 2011, Best of Ljubljana has grown into one of the city's most prestigious awards. Running for more than a decade and covering the same diverse selection of categories as our ever-popular Ljubljana In Your Pocket guides, the competitions regularly received tens of thousands of individual votes from the public every year. Of course that was before the Covid-19 pandemic ground them to a halt, as it did for most things in Slovenia, Europe and around the world.

But like that inspirational immortal bird of Greek mythology, our Best of Ljubljana competition rose from the figurative ashes that were the years 2020 and 2021, and returned better than ever in 2022, grew greater still in 2023 and 2024. And for 2025 have even bigger plans are in the pipeline!