🇭🇷 Croatia · Zagreb and the interior
Zagreb is the great capital many travellers skip on their way to the Dalmatian beaches, and that is a mistake: this Central European city, elegant and liveable, is one of Croatia's best-kept secrets. It has no sea, but it has something its famous coasts do not offer: the everyday life of a country, in its always-full cafés, its markets, its blue trams and a medieval old town climbing a hill above the modern city.
Zagreb makes sense on two levels. Up top is the Upper Town (Gornji Grad), the historic heart of cobbled streets, with St Mark's church and its coloured tiled roof, the Stone Gate with its shrine, the medieval towers and the viewpoints over the roofs. Below stretches the Lower Town (Donji Grad), laid out in the 19th century in the style of the Austro-Hungarian empire, with its 'green horseshoe' of squares and parks, palaces, museums, theatres and the great Ban Jelačić square, the meeting point of everyone in Zagreb.
This guide covers Zagreb with a practical, warm eye: how to get around by tram and on foot between the two towns, which museums are worth it (including the famous and moving Museum of Broken Relationships), where to take your coffee like a local, what to eat and how to make the most of both the bustle of its markets and the calm of its parks. A capital to be taken with time, ideal for starting or ending a trip around the country.
Zagreb was born of the union of two rival medieval settlements on two neighbouring hills: Kaptol, the ecclesiastical town around the cathedral, seat of the bishopric founded in 1094; and Gradec (or Grič), the borough of merchants and craftsmen that the Hungarian-Croatian king Bela IV declared a free royal city with the Golden Bull of 1242, after the Mongol invasion. For centuries the two hills lived side by side, at times at odds (hence names such as the Krvavi most, the 'bloody bridge'), until they were formally joined in 1850 into a single city called Zagreb. Under Habsburg rule, with the Croatian region part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Zagreb grew as the administrative and cultural centre of the Croatian people; after the great earthquake of 1880 it was rebuilt and expanded southwards with the elegant Lower Town of palaces and boulevards. In the 20th century it was the capital of a Croatia within the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and then within socialist Yugoslavia. With Croatian independence in 1991, after the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the war that followed, Zagreb became the capital of the new Republic of Croatia. In 2020 it suffered a strong earthquake that damaged the cathedral and the upper town, now under restoration. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Croatia's continental heart: a capital born of the rivalry between two hills — episcopal Kaptol and the free city of Gradec — seat of the Sabor and of the national awakening, and an interior of karst and forest where the Plitvice lakes saw the first blood spilled in the war of 1991.
Read the history of Zagreb and the interior →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Zagreb's history is, in origin, the history of two neighbouring rival towns set on two hills separated by a small stream, the Medveščak. The first documentary mention of the name 'Zagreb' is tied to the founding of the bishopric in 1094, when the Hungarian-Croatian king Ladislaus I established a diocese on the hill that would come to be called Kaptol. There, around the cathedral and the clergy's residences, an ecclesiastical town grew up, governed by the bishop.
On the neighbouring hill, called Gradec or Grič, a civic settlement developed in parallel: a borough of merchants and craftsmen. Its great moment came in 1242, when, after the devastating passage of the Mongol invasion through the region, King Bela IV granted Gradec a 'Golden Bull' (Zlatna bula) that made it a free royal city, with the right to fortify itself, to trade and to govern itself with a degree of autonomy. Of those medieval walls, the Lotrščak Tower and the Stone Gate survive today.
For centuries the two hills coexisted as separate entities, each with its own government, its walls and its interests. The rivalry between ecclesiastical Kaptol and mercantile Gradec sometimes spilled into open conflict and violent clashes; the name of the Krvavi most ('bloody bridge'), which crossed the stream between them, recalls those confrontations. This double nature — religious and civic, on two hills — is in the DNA of Zagreb's historic centre as you walk it today.
From 1527, after the Hungarian defeat by the Ottomans at Mohács (1526), the Croatian nobility chose the House of Habsburg to take the crown, and the Croatian lands — Zagreb included — were absorbed into the orbit of the Austrian monarchy. Through the 16th and 17th centuries, Croatia was frontier country against the advancing Ottoman Empire, which came to control much of the interior. Zagreb, though it never fell under Turkish rule, lived under the constant threat of raids and became a bastion and administrative centre of the Croatia of 'the remains of the remains' (reliquiae reliquiarum), as the small territory that held out was called.
In this context, Zagreb gained weight as the seat of Croatian political power within the Habsburg framework. The city housed more and more institutions: the Croatian diet or parliament (the Sabor), the residences of the ban (Croatia's governor or viceroy) and the Church's bodies. The two hills, Kaptol and Gradec, remained formally separate entities, but the urban whole we now call Zagreb was consolidating itself as the de facto capital of the Croatian people.
The Ottoman withdrawal at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th eased the pressure on the frontier and allowed some recovery. Zagreb gradually shed its character as a stronghold and grew as a baroque city, with noble palaces, convents and churches, above all in the upper town. Zagreb's identity as a Croatian national centre, within a multinational empire, was forged in these frontier centuries.
The 19th century was decisive in shaping modern Zagreb, on two levels: the urban and the political-cultural. On the urban level, in 1850 the two formerly rival towns, Gradec and Kaptol, together with the districts that had grown around them, were finally joined into a single administrative entity: the city of Zagreb, with one municipal government. That union ended centuries of separate existence and gave rise to the unified city we know.
On the political and cultural level, Zagreb became the heart of the 'Croatian national revival' (the so-called Illyrian Movement), which from the 1830s sought to assert Croatian language, culture and identity within the Austro-Hungarian empire. Figures such as Ljudevit Gaj drove the standardisation of the Croatian language and national consciousness. A central figure of the period was ban Josip Jelačić, governor at the time of the revolutions of 1848, whose equestrian statue presides today over the city's great central square.
The second half of the 19th century brought Zagreb a notable institutional and cultural flowering: the Academy of Sciences and Arts, the modern university, museums, galleries, theatres and cultural societies were founded or consolidated. The city began to expand southwards, beyond the old town, laying the ground for the great urban transformation that would follow the earthquake of 1880. Zagreb was establishing itself as the undisputed cultural capital of the Croats.
On 9 November 1880, a strong earthquake shook Zagreb and caused considerable damage across much of the city, including the cathedral. Far from halting its development, the catastrophe became the starting point of one of the greatest urban transformations in its history. The reconstruction and expansion that followed shaped the Zagreb we know today, especially its elegant Lower Town (Donji Grad).
The key figure in the reconstruction was the architect Hermann Bollé, who rebuilt the cathedral in neo-Gothic style, giving it its characteristic twin towers, and designed other emblematic works such as the arcades of the monumental Mirogoj cemetery. At the same time, the city expanded southwards following a modern urban plan, with regular blocks, wide boulevards and, above all, the so-called 'Lenuci Green Horseshoe': a U-shaped sequence of landscaped squares linking parks, pavilions and new public buildings.
In those final decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, Zagreb filled with palaces, museums, theatres (such as the Croatian National Theatre) and buildings in historicist and Secession styles (the local version of Austrian Art Nouveau). The city acquired that unmistakable Central European, Austro-Hungarian air that sets it apart from the rest of Croatia and that remains one of its great charms. The earthquake of 1880 was, paradoxically, the midwife of monumental, modern Zagreb.
The 20th century brought Zagreb a succession of changes of sovereignty that reflect the region's turbulent history. After the First World War and the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire (1918), the Croatian lands became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. In those years Zagreb was the capital of Croatia within that kingdom and an important political and cultural focus, the stage for tensions between Belgrade's centralism and Croatian aspirations to autonomy.
During the Second World War, Zagreb was the capital of the so-called Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945), a puppet regime of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, governed by the Ustaša movement, responsible for atrocious crimes. After liberation and the end of the war, Croatia joined Josip Broz Tito's socialist Yugoslavia as a republic, with Zagreb as its capital. In the postwar decades the city grew enormously, above all south of the river Sava, with the building of 'New Zagreb' (Novi Zagreb) and its modern housing blocks.
The great turning point came in 1991: after a referendum, Croatia declared independence amid the break-up of Yugoslavia, which set off a war. Zagreb, by then capital of the new Republic of Croatia, was hit by rocket attacks in 1991 and 1995, but was never occupied. With the end of the conflict and the consolidation of the Croatian state, the city established itself as the country's political, economic and cultural capital, and later as one of the faces of a Croatia integrated into the European Union (2013).
The Zagreb of the 21st century is a modern, safe and liveable European capital that has managed to keep its Central European character while opening up to tourism and contemporary cultural life. It is Croatia's administrative, university and economic heart, seat of the government, the parliament and the country's main institutions, a member of the European Union since 2013.
The city has cultivated its own distinctive cultural identity. 'Café culture' is almost an institution: Zagreb people spend hours on the terraces, and the Saturday morning ritual (the 'špica', when people come out to see and be seen in the centre) is part of urban folklore. Zagreb has also become famous for original cultural initiatives, such as the Museum of Broken Relationships, awarded as the most innovative museum in Europe, and for its Advent (Christmas market), voted several times the best on the whole continent, which fills the centre with lights and stalls in December.
In March 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, a strong earthquake struck the city again, causing damage in the upper town and, once more, to the cathedral, whose towers were seriously affected and scaffolded for restoration. Heritage recovery works have continued ever since. Even so, Zagreb remains a welcoming capital of growing tourist appeal, valued by anyone looking, beyond the famous Dalmatian beaches, for the everyday, cultured, Central European face of Croatia.