Zagreb, Croatia: the two old towns, Dolac market and the coffee ritual

The medieval city was not one settlement but two, on neighbouring hills, and the distinction still organises everything above the main square. Gradec was the free town of merchants and craftsmen; Kaptol grew around the cathedral. A stream ran in the hollow between them, and when the two were finally united into a single city in 1850 the watercourse was covered and became the street that now runs between the hills. Walk it and you can read the arrangement directly: on the Kaptol side the cathedral's twin spires dominate everything, currently wrapped in restoration work that will be part of the view for some time yet; on the Gradec side you climb into a compact grid of low streets around St Mark's Church, whose steep roof carries the coats of arms of the city and the kingdom picked out in glazed tile — the single most photographed object in Zagreb. Between them is the Stone Gate, a surviving town gate turned into a chapel that people still visit through the day. Get up there by the funicular, which climbs the slope in well under a minute and claims to be the shortest public funicular in the world.

South of the hills, nineteenth-century Zagreb was laid out on an idea rather than allowed to sprawl: a sequence of green squares linked into a horseshoe, each planted, each given a public building. The scheme is known locally after the planner associated with it, and walking the U is the most pleasant orientation walk in the city — you pass the Academy, the Art Pavilion in its ochre casing, the Archaeological Museum, the botanical garden at the bottom of the loop, and a series of fountains and benches that Zagreb genuinely uses. The architecture is Habsburg-era and deliberately unhurried: wide streets, low blocks, ornamental facades in yellow and cream. Two things follow for a visitor. First, the Lower Town is where most of the museums are, so a rainy day here is no loss. Second, the city is flat and legible at this level, and almost everything worth seeing sits inside a twenty-minute walk of the main square, which makes Zagreb an unusually low-effort capital to explore on foot.

Dolac market sits on a raised terrace directly above the main square, and it is the thing to see first. The upper level is open-air under a field of red parasols, selling fruit, vegetables and flowers from the surrounding countryside; underneath, a covered hall holds the butchers, the dairy stalls and the fishmongers. It is a working market that supplies the city rather than a heritage display, busiest in the morning and largely finished by early afternoon. Eat what the region eats, which is continental and has nothing to do with the coast: štrukli above all, sheets of thin dough with fresh cheese, either baked with cream until the top blisters or boiled and served in broth, and the dish Zagreb will argue about most readily. Then there is coffee, which here is a social institution rather than a drink. The Saturday late-morning turn around the cafés of the Lower Town — dressed, unhurried, and lasting hours over a single cup — is a genuine local ritual with its own name, and sitting through one is the most efficient way to understand the city's pace.

Zagreb's museum scene punches far above the city's size, and its best entries are idiosyncratic rather than encyclopaedic. The Museum of Broken Relationships is the famous one and deserves the reputation: a permanent collection of ordinary objects donated by people worldwide, each with a short caption written by the donor about the relationship it survived. It sounds like a gimmick and is in fact quietly devastating, and it grew out of a travelling art project into a permanent institution. The Museum of Naïve Art collects the Croatian self-taught painters — glass-backed, densely coloured village scenes — a genuinely distinctive national school you will not see gathered anywhere else. The Mimara holds a large mixed collection of European art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art sits across the river in a modern building with a slide running through it. North of the centre, Mirogoj is worth the short bus ride purely as architecture: a cemetery enclosed by long arcaded galleries under green domes, designed by the architect who shaped much of nineteenth-century Zagreb, and among the most beautiful built spaces in the country.

For a capital, Zagreb gets outdoors very easily. Maksimir is the great city park to the east — one of the earliest public parks laid out in this part of Europe, more landscaped woodland than lawn, with lakes, meadows, follies and the city zoo inside it; on a Sunday it is where Zagreb goes. West of the centre, Jarun is a lake with a beach, a rowing course and a ring of bars, which is the summer evening answer for people who cannot get to the sea. And directly north of the city rises Medvednica, the wooded ridge whose summit area is reached by road, cable car or on foot, with marked trails, a medieval fortress part-way up and a modest ski slope that operates when winter cooperates. That the capital has a mountain at the end of a tram line is the fact locals will tell you first, and it changes what a weekend here can look like — a museum morning and a forest afternoon are entirely compatible.

Zagreb Airport (ZAG) lies southeast of the city with a straightforward bus into the centre. Rail and coach links run to Ljubljana, Budapest, Vienna and Belgrade, and buses reach the Adriatic in two to four hours depending on where you are heading — Zagreb is a natural first or last stop on a Croatian trip rather than a detour. In town, the tram network is dense, cheap and the way locals move, though the centre is small enough to walk. On seasons: the city is at its best in late spring and early autumn, hot and somewhat empty in high summer when Croatia's visitors are all on the coast, and cold in winter — which is when it stages the thing it is now best known for. Zagreb's Advent turns the Lower Town horseshoe into a connected run of stalls, food and music through December and has been repeatedly judged the best Christmas market in Europe; if you are choosing dates, it is a genuine reason to come in winter. The one expectation to correct: there is no sea here, and a day trip to the coast is a long one.