Donji Milanovac is a young town in an ancient place. The old village of the same name, along with several others, was drowned in 1972 when the Iron Gates dam raised the Danube by many metres, and a new town was built on the high ground a few years earlier to take the displaced people. It is a tidy, planned place of about two and a half thousand, laid out around a wide bay, with a promenade, a small port and a clutch of cafes where fishermen and tourists sit side by side. Majdanpek, the nearest larger town, is up in the hills, and across the river lie the Romanian villages of the Banat.
The area is a treasure house for anyone interested in the deep past. A short way upstream lies Lepenski Vir, a prehistoric settlement dating back some eight thousand years, where the people who lived here carved heavy boulders into the likeness of fish-headed figures, among the oldest monumental sculpture in Europe. A museum now protects the site, and it was moved to higher ground to save it from the flood. Downriver, cut into the cliff above the water, runs a Roman road, and there you can still see a stone tablet, the Tabula Traiana, which commemorates the emperor Trajan's engineering of the passage around the year 100.
On the Romanian bank, a few kilometres downstream, an enormous face has been carved into the rock, depicting Decebalus, the last king of the Dacians, who resisted Trajan. It was finished in the early 2000s and can be seen clearly from the Serbian road or from a boat. The Danube at the Iron Gates is a place where ancient emperors and modern engineers have both left their marks.
The road from here to Golubac, and eastward toward Kladovo, is some of the finest riding in the region. It is mostly smooth, with wide curves and tunnels, and it runs close to the river for long stretches. In midsummer it is hot and quiet. In spring and autumn the hills are green or gold. Fuel is available in town, but do not rely on stations in the villages. Grilled river fish, fresh bread and local wine are the order of the day, and the sunset over the gorge is a fine way to end it.