🇭🇷 Europe
The Adriatic coast: walled Dubrovnik, the Dalmatian islands and the Plitvice lakes make Croatia a Mediterranean gem.
Croatia is basically a coastline: one thousand seven hundred kilometres of Adriatic shore and more than a thousand islands, with clear water, pale stone villages and orange tile roofs unchanged since the Middle Ages. The country is shaped like a crescent and that geography rules any itinerary: almost everything you want to see sits on the sea, and the interior, where the capital is, works like a different country altogether.
What surprises you on arrival is how much history sits on top of the beaches. Split literally grew inside the palace that Emperor Diocletian had built for himself in the year 300, with people living today among the Roman columns. Dubrovnik keeps two kilometres of complete walls that you can walk along the top of. Pula has an almost intact Roman amphitheatre that still hosts concerts. And Plitvice, inland, is a system of sixteen stepped lakes joined by waterfalls, crossed by wooden boardwalks laid over the water.
Two things worth knowing up front, because many guidebooks are still out of date: since 1 January 2023 Croatia uses the euro — the kuna no longer exists — and it is part of the Schengen area, so there is no check when you enter from Slovenia or Hungary, but your days here do count against the 90-day allowance. And since 2022 the Pelješac bridge lets you reach Dubrovnik without going through Bosnia, which wiped out two border checks that meant hours of queuing in summer.
The local currency is the euro (EUR). Carry some cash, tell your bank before you travel and check the day's exchange rate.
Full converter for EUR →Zagreb (ZAG), Split (SPU), Dubrovnik (DBV) and Zadar (ZAD) all take European flights, with far more frequencies in summer. The rail network is poor and does not even reach Dubrovnik, so the real intercity transport is the bus: frequent, punctual and cheap. You reach the islands on Jadrolinija's ferries and catamarans from Split and Zadar; the car ferries are slower and need to be booked ahead in season. One important change if you are driving: since July 2022 the Pelješac bridge lets you reach Dubrovnik without crossing the Bosnian corridor at Neum, which means skipping two border checks that meant hours of queuing in summer.
The two best windows are June and September. The sea is already, or still, warm, the sun is settled, the ferries run on their high-season timetable, and you suffer neither the heat nor the crowds of July and August, which in Dubrovnik, Split and Hvar are genuinely overwhelming and push accommodation prices up. September tends to be the favourite month of repeat visitors: the water is at its warmest of the year and prices start to come down.
May and October are excellent for the national parks, the cities and the Istrian coast, with comfortable walking temperatures, though the sea is cold for most people and some island services cut back frequencies. From November to March the coast goes into hibernation: many hotels, restaurants and island ferries simply close, and Dubrovnik and Hvar are left almost empty. In those months Zagreb makes sense, as it runs all year and is at its best in December with the Christmas market.
The cooking changes completely depending on which side of the country you are on. On the coast it is Mediterranean: grilled fish and seafood with olive oil, garlic and parsley, black cuttlefish risotto, octopus cooked under the peka — an iron bell covered in embers — and oysters from the bay of Ston, eaten right there. Inland and in Zagreb the influence is Central European and Austro-Hungarian: meat, stews, strudel and štrukli, a pastry filled with fresh cheese that is Zagreb's signature dish.
Istria deserves a paragraph of its own: it is truffle country — one of the world's largest was found there — the source of internationally awarded olive oil and of white wines such as Istrian malvasia, and eating well there costs considerably less than in Dalmatia. To drink, besides wine, there is rakija, a homemade spirit that turns up at the end of any meal and is usually the house's own, and Zadar's maraschino, a cherry liqueur produced since the 18th century. One useful habit: in konobas, the family-run taverns, you eat better and cheaper than in the seafront restaurants.
Croatia is a very safe country, with low crime rates even by European standards, and you can walk at night without trouble in any city. What there is: pickpockets in the concentrated tourist areas of Dubrovnik and Split in high season, and a few price traps — taxis without a meter, and seafront restaurants with no prices on the menu or with fish charged by weight at rates far above normal, which you should ask about before ordering. The emergency number is 112.
The health system is good and travel insurance is essential; for a Schengen visa you are required to hold one with minimum cover of thirty thousand euros. Tap water is drinkable throughout the country. The real risks are sea and sun: the Croatian coast is almost all stone and sea urchins are abundant, so water shoes head off the most common mishap of the trip; the Adriatic sun in July is fierce and deceives you because there is always a breeze. One last point: in some rural inland areas away from the coast there are still signposted minefields left from the war of the nineties, so do not leave marked trails or ignore warning signs.
Croatia has stopped being the cheap Adriatic destination: today it sits at a mid-range European level, dearer than Albania or Montenegro and a little cheaper than Italy, with Dubrovnik as the genuinely expensive exception. As a rough guide, with no official source because none exists for these items, a dorm bed usually runs from twenty-five to forty-five euros, an apartment or private room from sixty to one hundred and twenty, a main course in a konoba from fifteen to twenty-five euros and a coffee from two to three. In July and August in Dubrovnik and Hvar all of that can double.
What cuts the bill most is where you sleep and when you go. Sobe and apartmani — rooms and flats let out by families — are the traditional way to stay on the coast and cost considerably less than a hotel. Sleeping outside the walls of Dubrovnik, or in Cavtat or on the Elafiti islands, changes the maths a lot. Travelling in June or September instead of August is the other big lever. Scheduled public ferries cost a fraction of the organised excursions and go to the same places. And budget for the nightly tourist tax, charged separately and varying by city and season.
Croatians are more reserved than you would expect from a Mediterranean country, especially on first contact, but warm and direct once the ice is broken. Coffee is a social institution: sitting over one for an hour or two, unhurried, watching people go by, is an activity in itself and not an errand; in Zagreb, Saturday morning on a terrace is practically a collective ritual. On the coast the pace drops and meals stretch out. Tipping is not compulsory and you round up, between five and ten per cent if you liked the service.
There is one subject to handle with care: the war of independence of the nineties is a single generation away and still very present. In Vukovar and in some inland areas you still see buildings marked by bullets. People will talk about it if it comes up, but it is not light conversation or tourist curiosity, and it is best not to offer opinions on which side was responsible or to refer to the country as Yugoslavia. Another detail: Croatia is Catholic and in small towns you should enter churches with shoulders and knees covered, something several cathedrals on the coast also ask for.
The history of Croatia is that of a narrow, elongated land curled around the Adriatic like a crescent moon, and one that spent a thousand years as a frontier: between Rome and the barbarians, between the West and Byzantium, between Latin Christendom and Ottoman Islam, between the Habsburgs and Venice, between Yugoslavia and the world. On this soil an empire was abdicated — Diocletian, the only Roman emperor to give up power of his own will, retired to die in his palace at Split — a medieval kingdom was raised and crowned under Tomislav, an independent merchant republic, Ragusa, flourished for four centuries and abolished slavery before almost anyone else in Europe, and, on the very edge of the 21st century, one of the cruellest wars fought on the continent since 1945 was waged here.
Travelling through Croatia means reading that layered history in the stones: in the Roman amphitheatre of Pula, in the walls of Dubrovnik, in Diocletian's palace turned into a living city, in the Venetian bell towers of Dalmatia and in the still-new roofs of Vukovar. It also means looking squarely at the harshest chapters of 20th-century Europe — the Independent State of Croatia and its crimes, the Jasenovac camp, the Istrian exodus of the Italians, Tito's Yugoslavia, the war of independence of 1991-1995 and the tragedy of the Serb Krajina — with the intention of telling them precisely and without taking an ethnic side. Today Croatia is a country of the European Union, the Schengen area and the eurozone; but every one of its destinations holds the memory of having stood, century after century, on the line where worlds collided.
Read the full history of Croatia →Pick a region and open each destination to see what to do, prices and how to get there.
These are the sources we cite most across this country's guides, with how many times each appears. Hard data —tickets, opening hours, requirements, transport— comes from the official source and carries the date we checked it. Restaurant and hotel picks come from guides and reviews, and we say so on each page.
