Croatia: Dubrovnik, Split and the Lakes of Plitvice

I came up onto the Dubrovnik walls just after they opened, before the heat and the tour groups, and the whole old town fell away beneath me in a single sweep of orange tile. Two kilometres of rampart ring the city in pale Dalmatian stone, and you walk the full circuit clockwise above the rooftops, the Adriatic on one shoulder so blue it looks dyed, the packed lanes on the other already filling with footsteps echoing up the limestone. I'd braced myself for a film set — and yes, there are people who come only for the dragons and the staircases — but what stayed with me was older and quieter than any of that: a sea-republic that fortified itself against the centuries and somehow won.

This was the start of a slow week down the Croatian coast, all of it built from the same white stone: Dubrovnik in the deep south, Split halfway up where a Roman emperor's palace never stopped being lived in, and then a hard turn inland to a forest where the water comes down in turquoise terraces. Croatia is long and thin, strung along the Adriatic like a necklace of islands and walled towns, and you can travel a lot of it by ferry and bus without ever feeling you've rushed.

Dubrovnik: a city you read from the top down

The walls are the thing, and the way to do them is early. From up there the old town makes sense in a way it never does from inside: the main street, the Stradun, a polished marble channel running spine-straight through the middle; the bell tower; the round forts squatting at the corners where the stone meets the sea. I let the crowd thin and just leaned on the parapet, watching a kayak draw a thread across the water toward the wooded island of Lokrum. Dubrovnik is genuinely overrun in high summer — cruise ships unload thousands into a town that fits a fraction of them — so I'd booked my wall ticket for opening and kept the middle of the day for shade and a swim. Game of Thrones put it on a lot of lists, which is fair enough, but the city was a fortified UNESCO treasure for five hundred years before any of that, and it shows.

« Walk the walls at opening and the same lanes that crush you at noon belong, for an hour, only to you. »

Here's the part I'll be straight about, because it's the opposite of the worry people carry into the Balkans: Croatia made all of this easy. It joined the European Union in 2013, and since the start of 2023 it's been in the Schengen area and uses the euro — which means if your phone plan is already European, the roam-like-at-home rule simply follows you over the border with nothing to switch on. I'd half-expected the usual frontier dance of toggling roaming and hunting café wifi, the way you do in Serbia or Montenegro a short drive away, and instead my data just kept running off the same bundle, same prices, the moment I arrived. On the walls I pulled up the ferry timetable to the islands without a second thought.

Split: a palace that never emptied out

Three hours up the coast, Split is the antidote to Dubrovnik's perfection — louder, messier, gloriously alive. Its old town isn't built beside a Roman ruin; it's built inside one. The Emperor Diocletian put up a vast seaside retirement palace here around seventeen hundred years ago, and when the empire faded, people simply moved in and never left. So you wander through a substructure of imperial cellars and come out into a square ringed by Roman columns where a café has set its tables, washing strung between pillars that held up a palace, a cathedral wedged into what was once the emperor's mausoleum. I had an evening coffee on the Riva, the palm-lined waterfront, with the whole limestone front of the palace going gold behind me, and I couldn't quite get over that all of it was still in use, still ordinary, still somebody's front door.

Split is also the engine room of the islands. The Jadrolinija ferries fan out from its harbour to Hvar with its lavender and nightlife, to quiet vineyard-stitched Korčula, to Brač and the long white tongue of Zlatni Rat beach. I gave myself a single day on Hvar — town walls, a fortress on the hill, a swim off the rocks — and could happily have stayed a week. North of Split, if you have the time, Zadar hides a sea organ that turns the waves into low chords through pipes set in the quayside, and inland Istria trades the coast for truffles and Italianate hill towns; I ran out of days before I reached either, which felt like the right kind of regret.

Plitvice: the forest where the water falls in steps

Then I left the sea entirely and drove inland to Plitvice Lakes, and it was so different it barely felt like the same country. Sixteen lakes lie strung down a wooded valley in terraces, each one tipping into the next over travertine ledges in a continuous chain of waterfalls, the water an unreal mineral turquoise that goes green in the shallows and almost white where it churns. You don't view it from a distance — wooden boardwalks run right across the surface, low over the pools, so you walk inches above water you can see straight to the bottom of, trout hanging in it like they're suspended in glass. It's a UNESCO national park and a strict one: you stay on the walkways, you book a timed entry, and in summer the quota fills, which is exactly the moment a data connection earns its keep. I'd reserved my slot the night before and checked the trail map on my phone at the entrance rather than queue blind for a paper one.

What I take away

Croatia gave me three versions of the same white stone — a sea-fortress read from its ramparts, a Roman palace still warm with daily life, and a forest where the water comes down in turquoise stairs — knitted together by a slow blue thread of ferries. The summer crowds are real, so I leaned hard on early starts and shoulder-season instincts, and the one thing I never had to think about was my phone: European border crossed, plan unchanged, hands free for the view and the timetable both. Go in May or September if you can, walk the walls at dawn, and let the Adriatic do the rest.

— Hugo, still squinting at orange rooftops and the green stillness above the Plitvice boards.