Split-Dalmatia

Diocletian's Palace, built around 305 AD as the retirement residence of the Roman emperor Diocletian, is the reason Split exists in its present form — rather than falling into ruin after the empire's collapse, the palace was gradually settled by local residents fleeing the destruction of nearby Salona, who built their homes directly into and around the imperial structure. The result, unique among Roman remains anywhere, is a complex that has been continuously inhabited for over 1,700 years: the Peristyle, the palace's grand ceremonial courtyard, is now a public square ringed by cafés; the Cathedral of St Domnius, remarkably, occupies what was originally Diocletian's own mausoleum, making it one of the oldest cathedral buildings anywhere still in its original structure; and ordinary Split residents live in apartments carved into walls that once housed a Roman garrison. The palace basements, among the best-preserved substructures of their kind, are now lined with market stalls and open to walking tours. Beyond the palace walls, the Riva — Split's palm-lined waterfront promenade — is the city's genuine social centre, filled each evening with residents rather than staged for visitors, and Marjan, the forested hill rising directly behind the old town, offers walking and cycling trails with views back across the palace roofs to the sea.

Hvar Town, on the island of the same name, pairs a compact Venetian-era old town — a grand main square, a 16th-century cathedral, and a hilltop Spanish Fortress with sweeping views over the harbour and the offshore Pakleni Islands — with a reputation as the glamorous end of Dalmatian island life, drawing a yacht-set crowd to its harbour bars and beach clubs through the summer months. Away from the town itself, the island's interior turns quiet and agricultural: lavender fields, planted widely enough that the plant has become something of an unofficial island symbol, colour the hills purple through early summer, and small vineyards and olive groves cover the terraced slopes inland. The Pakleni Islands, a short boat ride from Hvar Town's harbour, offer a string of quieter coves and beaches genuinely distinct from the town's own busier waterfront, reachable by water taxi throughout the day.

Brač is best known internationally for Zlatni Rat, the distinctive pebble beach at Bol whose narrow tip shifts shape and direction with the prevailing wind and current, making its exact outline genuinely different from one visit to the next — a natural feature rather than a maintained one, and among the most photographed beaches on the entire Adriatic coast. Less widely known is that Brač's pale limestone quarries supplied the building stone for Diocletian's Palace itself in Split, and the same Brač stone was later used, according to well-documented tradition, in the construction of the White House in Washington — a direct material link between the island's quarries and buildings an ocean apart. Inland, the village of Škrip preserves an olive-oil museum and some of the island's oldest stone architecture, while Bol's own old town, considerably quieter than Hvar's, retains a working fishing-harbour character alongside the beach crowds that gather at Zlatni Rat through summer.

Vis remained off-limits to foreign visitors until 1989, having served as a closed Yugoslav military base for decades — a restriction that, perhaps counterintuitively, left the island with less coastal development than almost anywhere else in Dalmatia, since the tourism infrastructure that transformed islands like Hvar simply had no opportunity to take hold during those decades. The result today is an island that reads as genuinely less polished than its neighbours: abandoned military tunnels and bunkers are scattered across the island's hills, available to explore in places, and the fishing villages of Vis Town and Komiža retain a working-harbour character with fewer concessions to large-scale tourism. The Blue Cave, on the tiny neighbouring islet of Biševo, is Vis's best-known natural draw — sunlight entering through an underwater opening illuminates the cave's interior water with a genuine electric-blue glow, at its most vivid around midday when the sun angle is highest, reachable by organised boat tour from Vis or Komiža.

Split's ferry and catamaran port is the county's practical hub, with Jadrolinija and several catamaran operators running frequent services to Hvar, Brač and Vis through the summer season, alongside less frequent winter schedules. Brač, the closest of the three, is typically under an hour away by fast catamaran; Hvar and Vis both run somewhat longer but remain comfortably manageable as day trips or, better, as overnight stops on a longer island-hopping route. Split's own airport, a short distance from the city centre, functions as the practical gateway for the whole county, including the islands, since most inbound travellers arrive in Split before continuing on to any of the surrounding islands by boat.