The whole country by bus, catamaran and one fifteen-minute ferry — the karst lakes early, Roman Split, two nights on Hvar, then the bridge that lets the coast road miss Bosnia, the salt pans at Ston and the Pelješac vineyards before the last boat south.
Zagreb
Arrive and stay a night rather than transferring straight out. Dolac market above the main square in the morning, the Upper Town on foot, and the cathedral, which lost the top of its south spire in the earthquake of 22 March 2020 and the top of the north one a month after that, to a controlled charge and a crane, because it was going to come down anyway. Still in scaffolding. Zagreb is Central European and inland and looks nothing like the rest of this route, which is the reason to start here.
Plitvice Lakes
Sixteen terraced lakes falling into each other over travertine dams that the water is still building. Book a timed entry slot online and take the first one: the park caps daily numbers and the boardwalks are one-way, so an hour's head start is the difference between a gorge and a corridor of people. Stay outside the gates at Rastoke or Grabovac, not in the park hotels.
Down to Zadar
Out of the mountains to the sea. Zadar was Italian until 1947, was bombed to roughly half-ruin by the Allies in 1943 and 1944, and was rebuilt on its Roman street grid over the top of the damage. The Sea Organ and the Greeting to the Sun on the waterfront are from 2005 and 2008 and are the only pieces of public art on this coast that locals actually use.
Paklenica
North-east to the Velebit wall and up the Velika Paklenica gorge — three hours to Manita peć cave and back, or all day to the plateau. The gorge is also Croatia's climbing centre: the 350-metre face of Anića kuk has more than a hundred multi-pitch routes on it and there is usually somebody halfway up. Back to Zadar for the night.
Šibenik and Krka
Boat up the drowned river mouth from Skradin to Skradinski buk. Swimming under the main falls was banned on 1 January 2021 after the pools had become a bathing resort, and the park is a better place for it. In Šibenik itself, the cathedral was built between 1431 and 1536 entirely from interlocking stone slabs — no brick, no timber, no mortar in the vaulting.
Split
Diocletian built a retirement palace here around 295 to 305 AD and a couple of thousand people still live inside its walls — not beside them, inside them, in flats built into the colonnades over seventeen centuries. It survives because it was never excavated. It was lived in, without a break, and the kitchens and stairwells wedged between the columns are load-bearing — the reason the columns are still standing, not damage done to them.
Klis and Salona
City bus 22 up to the fortress on the pass, which Petar Kružić held against the Ottomans until 1537 and which controls the only easy road inland. Below it, Salona was the Roman capital of Dalmatia and a city of tens of thousands; when it fell in the early 7th century its refugees walked five kilometres down the coast and moved into Diocletian's palace. Split is what they built there.
To Hvar
Morning catamaran out to Hvar Town. The Fortica above the harbour is worth the climb for the Pakleni islands laid out below it. Prices here are the highest on the coast and the town knows it; the island stops being expensive about fifteen minutes inland.
The Stari Grad Plain
Greek colonists from Paros founded Pharos here in 384 BC and divided the plain into rectangular plots with dry-stone walls. The walls are still there, the plots are still the plots, and the fields are still worked — 2,400 years of continuous use of the same land survey, which is why UNESCO listed it in 2008. Walk or cycle it; there is nothing to look at except the oldest working field boundaries in Europe.
Over the bridge to Ston
A transfer day and the best one on the route. Catamaran back to Split, then the bus south — motorway to Ploče, then out across the Pelješac Bridge, 2,404 metres of cable-stayed steel opened in July 2022 to avoid the nine kilometres of Bosnian road that used to sit in the way. Off at Ston, at the neck of the peninsula.
Ston: walls, salt and oysters
Ragusa bought Ston and the whole peninsula in 1333 and immediately walled it — five and a half kilometres of it, up over the hill and down to Mali Ston, built to protect the thing that paid for the republic. The salt pans below are still worked by hand on the same layout, and in September you can watch it happen. Oysters in Mali Ston bay, eaten within sight of where they grew.
The Pelješac wine road
West along the spine of the peninsula to Potomje and the Dingač slope — Plavac Mali on ground steep enough that grapes were carried out by donkey until a tunnel was driven through the ridge in the 1970s. Dingač was Croatia's first protected appellation, in 1961. The road is narrow, the drops are unfenced, and the tastings are in people's garages.
Korčula
Fifteen minutes across the channel. The old town is built on a fishbone plan — the streets on the west side curve to block the bura, the ones on the east run straight to pull in the afternoon maestral, and it works. The Marco Polo birthplace claim has no evidence behind it whatsoever and the town sells it anyway; go for the Grk wine at Lumbarda instead, grown on sand and made nowhere else.
Dubrovnik
The last boat south. Walk the walls at eight in the morning or after five, never between — the city caps cruise arrivals now but the caps are generous and the middle of the day is still solid. Then look north from the Minčeta tower at the Elaphiti islands and at how small the republic that ran all of this actually was.
Good to know
The fast catamarans are seasonal — most coastal lines run from roughly late April to October, and the direct Split–Dubrovnik service vanishes entirely in winter, leaving the slow car ferries. The one exception is the last leg: Korčula to Dubrovnik has a catamaran year round, daily, but out of season it is a single early-morning sailing in each direction, which dictates the shape of the whole final day. Book Plitvice and Krka online in advance: both sell timed entry, Plitvice caps daily numbers, and a peak-summer ticket costs about four times the winter one — Plitvice is €10 in January and €40 in July. Check which road your Split–Dubrovnik bus takes — most now use the Pelješac Bridge, but some still run the old D8 through Neum, which means two Bosnian border posts, passports out twice, and up to an hour of queueing in August. Croatia has used the euro and been inside Schengen since 1 January 2023; Bosnia and Herzegovina is outside both. The bura, the north-easterly that comes off the Velebit, closes the Maslenica bridge to high-sided vehicles and cancels catamarans — mostly between November and March, but not only — so keep a spare day before any flight home.
Shorter or longer?
Five days at the start: Zagreb to Pula for the amphitheatre, Rovinj, and the hill towns of Motovun and Grožnjan. It is the least Dalmatian part of Croatia, the food is northern Italian, and it puts Plitvice on the way south rather than at the beginning.
Drop Zagreb, Plitvice, Zadar and Krka and fly into Split. You lose the karst and the only inland day, and you keep the palace, Hvar, the bridge, Ston and Korčula — which is most of what people came for.