Each house is built from logs, with the gaps between them filled with clay and then painted bright white, pale blue, or yellow. The roofs are made of small wooden tiles called shingles, lined up like fish scales. People in Slovakia have been building houses this way for a very long time, but most villages tore theirs down and built modern ones. Vlkolínec kept its.
Only a handful of people live in Vlkolínec full-time. The rest of the houses are looked after as a kind of open-air museum, where visitors can walk through, peek inside, and see how families lived hundreds of years ago. There is a small wooden bell tower, a wooden well in the middle of the village, and a stream running along the edge.
The village sits in a valley at the foot of a wooded mountain called Sidorovo. From above, the houses look like a string of beads laid out in the grass. In summer, the gardens are full of vegetables and bees. In winter, the deep snow sits on the dark roofs and makes the whole village look like a postcard.
The name 'Vlkolínec' might come from an old Slovak word for 'wolf'. Long ago wolves did live in the surrounding mountains - and a few still do, deep in the forests. People in the village used to keep their animals close at night because of them.