Explore Croatia

Dubrovnik

The 'Pearl of the Adriatic' sits behind a near-perfect ring of limestone walls that have guarded the city since the 13th century. Every alleyway of the marble-paved Stradun leads to baroque fountains, Renaissance palaces, and sea-blue views — a UNESCO site that earns its fame and then some.

Split

Croatia's second city grew up inside the retirement palace of Roman Emperor Diocletian, built around 305 AD — and people never left. Today restaurants, bars, and apartments fill the ancient cellars and colonnaded halls, making Split the most lived-in Roman monument in the world.

Zagreb

The capital pairs a handsome Austro-Hungarian upper town of cathedral spires and art museums with a buzzing lower-city café culture that rivals Vienna on a budget. The Museum of Broken Relationships alone — a global institution born here — tells you everything about Zagreb's wit and warmth.

Hvar Town

Set around a broad harbour facing a string of pine-covered Pakleni islands, Hvar is Croatia's most glamorous island stop — yacht-heavy in summer, lavender-scented in spring, and pinned together by a 16th-century Venetian fortress watching over the rooftops.

Rovinj

Rovinj's old town rises from the Istrian sea like a baroque wedding cake, its coloured houses stacked on a former island that was joined to the mainland in the 18th century. The cobbled lanes, the hilltop Church of St. Euphemia, and an artistic community that stayed when the tourists arrived make this the most photogenic town on the peninsula.

Poreč

Poreč shelters one of the best-preserved Byzantine monuments outside Ravenna: the Euphrasian Basilica, decorated with gold mosaics commissioned by Bishop Euphrasius in the 6th century and still gleaming under a UNESCO listing. Beyond the old town, the Poreč Riviera stretches along a coast studded with pine forests and Blue Flag beaches.

Korčula Town

Korčula's old town — a herringbone grid of lanes inside medieval walls on a small peninsula — is sometimes called 'Little Dubrovnik', though locals will tell you it predates and surpasses the comparison. The island's dark wine, Grk, grows only here; the weekly Moreška sword dance has been performed without interruption since the 16th century.

Zadar

Zadar answers the question of what happens when a Roman forum, a 9th-century cathedral, a sea-powered organ, and a sun-salutation light installation all share the same peninsula. Alfred Hitchcock called the Zadar sunset the most beautiful in the world — the city hasn't let him down.

Šibenik

Šibenik is the only major Dalmatian town founded entirely by Croats rather than Romans or Venetians, and its Cathedral of St. James — a structural marvel built without mortar, its roof of interlocking stone slabs engineered by Juraj Dalmatinac — earned UNESCO recognition in 2000. The medieval fortress of St. Michael looms above a compact old town packed with game-of-thrones filming locations.

Trogir

Trogir occupies its own tiny island, connected by bridges to the mainland and to the island of Čiovo, its entire old town a UNESCO World Heritage Site that looks much as it did when Venetian merchants governed it in the 15th century. The Cathedral of St. Lawrence's west portal, carved by Radovan in 1240, is the finest Romanesque-Gothic relief in Croatia.

Pula

Pula's 1st-century Roman amphitheatre — one of the six largest in the world, with a capacity of 23,000 — still hosts summer opera performances and film festivals under the open sky. Beyond the arena, Pula's old town conceals a triumphal arch, a Roman temple, and Byzantine floor mosaics that most visitors walk straight past.

Makarska

Backed by the sheer white limestone cliff of Biokovo mountain and facing a coast of fine pebble beaches, Makarska is the Dalmatian Riviera at its most dramatic. The mountain offers some of Croatia's best hiking with panoramic views across to Italy on clear days, while the town below fills with beach clubs and seafood restaurants all summer.

Opatija

Opatija was Croatia's first resort, beloved of Habsburg royalty and the Viennese bourgeoisie who built grand hotels and a coastal promenade along the Kvarner Gulf in the late 19th century. The Lungomare walkway still passes art nouveau villas and magnolia gardens, with the Učka massif rising steeply behind the town.

Bol (Brač Island)

Bol's Zlatni Rat — a finger of white pebble that shifts shape with the currents and juts into a turquoise sea — is Croatia's most photographed beach and one of Europe's most distinctive natural formations. Excellent windsurfing conditions draw professionals and enthusiasts from across the continent.

Vis Town

The most remote of Croatia's inhabited islands, Vis was a Yugoslav military base until 1989 and opened to tourism only when the army left — which is precisely why it remains unspoiled. Underwater caves, WWII tunnels, exceptional local wine (Vugava), and a fishing village atmosphere that the Hvar crowds never found make it a insider favourite.

Cavtat

A small walled town 18 km south of Dubrovnik, Cavtat curves around two bays backed by cypress-covered hills and has been a resort since the Romans founded Epidaurus here in the 3rd century BC. The Račić mausoleum by sculptor Ivan Meštrović on the hilltop cemetery is one of the finest early 20th-century monuments in Croatia.

Rijeka

Croatia's third-largest city and its main seaport, Rijeka has a proudly working industrial edge balanced by an eclectic mix of Habsburg architecture, a chaotic carnival that rivals Rio for intensity, and an arts scene emboldened by its stint as European Capital of Culture in 2020.

Varaždin

Varaždin served as Croatia's capital in the 18th century, and the baroque mansions, fountains, and the impeccably preserved castle complex it accumulated during that period make it the finest baroque city in the country. The old town cemetery — laid out as a landscape garden with clipped topiary — is an unlikely highlight that draws admirers from across Europe.

Pag Town

Pag sits on an almost lunar island — barren limestone plateau, sparse vegetation, fierce Bura wind — but the moonscape beauty and the quality of its sheep's milk cheese (Paški sir) and lace (UNESCO intangible heritage) draw visitors who find the austerity itself compelling. The island's salt flats have been harvested since Roman times.

Mljet Village

Mljet is the greenest island in the Adriatic, its western third a national park of saltwater lakes, pine forests, and a 12th-century Benedictine monastery on a tiny island within a lake — itself within an island, nested like a Croatian matryoshka. Swimming, kayaking, and cycling through forest paths are the primary activities; nightlife is not.

Dubrovnik's medieval old city — enclosed within walls built in the 13th–17th centuries and rising directly from the sea — represents one of the finest examples of a late-medieval walled city in the world. The Republic of Ragusa it protected was a maritime trading power whose diplomacy kept it independent between Venice and the Ottoman Empire for nearly 450 years.

Roman Emperor Diocletian built his retirement palace at Split around 305 AD — a fortified compound of 31,000 square metres that became, after his death, a ready-made city into which displaced Slavic refugees moved and never left. Today the palace walls enclose a living neighbourhood of apartments, restaurants, and bars, making it the most inhabited Roman monument anywhere in Europe.

Plitvice's sixteen terraced lakes — interconnected by a cascade of 90 waterfalls and coloured turquoise, green, and blue by dissolved minerals — form one of the most visually spectacular landscapes in Europe. The travertine barriers that create the lakes are still actively growing, shaped by algae, mosses, and bacteria in a living geological process.

Bishop Euphrasius commissioned this extraordinary complex in the 6th century, and the basilica's apse mosaics — shimmering gold portraits of saints and a Virgin with gold-haloed angels — rank among the finest examples of Byzantine art outside Ravenna. The complex preserves the full sequence of early Christian architecture on a single site: atrium, baptistery, memory chapel, and bishop's palace.

Trogir's entire old town occupies a tiny island linked by bridges, its urban fabric laid out by Greek colonists in the 3rd century BC and refined by Romans, Venetians, and Croats across two thousand years without a break in continuity. The Cathedral of St. Lawrence, with its Romanesque-Gothic west portal carved by Radovan in 1240, is considered the finest medieval relief sculpture in Dalmatia.

Built entirely of limestone between 1431 and 1535, the Cathedral of St. James solved the engineering problem of constructing a large stone vault without mortar by interlocking shaped stone blocks like a three-dimensional jigsaw — a technique invented on site by master builder Juraj Dalmatinac that influenced Renaissance construction across the Adriatic. A frieze of 74 realistic portrait heads of Šibenik citizens rings the exterior at apse level.

The Stari Grad Plain on the island of Hvar preserves the original land division established by Greek colonists from Paros around 384 BC — a grid of stone-walled plots (chora) that has been continuously farmed for over 2,400 years without alteration to the boundaries. Olives and vines still grow in the same plots the ancient Greeks laid out, making it the best-preserved example of ancient Greek land organisation in the world.

Stećci are monumental medieval tombstones produced between the 12th and 16th centuries across Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro, and Serbia — a transnational tradition of funerary art unique to the Western Balkans. The carved decorations range from abstract spirals to hunting scenes, jousting knights, and kolo circle dances, preserving a visual record of medieval life across confessional boundaries.

A transnational serial property shared with Italy and Montenegro, this inscription covers the network of fortifications built by the Republic of Venice to defend its empire against the Ottoman advance — a revolutionary military architecture that influenced fortress design across Europe. In Croatia, the inscription includes Zadar's star fort and the fortifications of Šibenik, built using new bastioned designs that replaced medieval tower walls.

Croatia's Strict Forest Reserve Čorkova Uvala in Plitvice Lakes National Park forms part of this vast transnational inscription spread across 18 European countries, documenting the post-Ice Age spread of European beech across the continent. These old-growth forests are the largest and least-disturbed primeval beech ecosystems remaining in Europe, providing a benchmark for studying temperate forest ecology undisturbed by modern management.