Explore Belgrade: Zemun, New Belgrade & the River Islands

For centuries Zemun stood on the Habsburg side of the Sava while Belgrade proper remained under Ottoman control across the water — a border-town history distinct from the capital's own, and one still legible in Zemun's character. The Gardoš Tower, built in 1896 to mark a thousand years of Hungarian settlement in the region, crowns a hillside old town of narrow lanes and small squares, with panoramic views back over the river toward Kalemegdan. Below, the Zemun quay is lined with fish restaurants specialising in freshwater river catch, a genuinely different dining scene from Skadarlija's meat-forward kafanas across the water.

New Belgrade began in 1948 as a planned city built almost entirely on marshland between the Sava and the old town — wide boulevards, large residential blocks and monumental modernist and Brutalist architecture laid out according to a single planning vision rather than growing organically over centuries the way central Belgrade did. The district is now home to the Sava Centre and much of Belgrade's modern business and hotel infrastructure, and its scale and architectural consistency make it a genuinely different visual experience from the layered, centuries-deep streetscape across the river — a planned mid-twentieth-century city standing directly opposite one of Europe's oldest continuously settled sites.

Great War Island sits directly at the point where the Sava meets the Danube, an uninhabited, protected nature reserve of dense forest, wetland and sandy river beaches reachable by a short ferry from either bank. It's a genuinely wild space within the city limits — a significant birdwatching site along the Danube migratory corridor, and in summer a popular unofficial beach for Belgraders looking for river swimming without leaving town. The contrast with the fortress and the planned city on either side of it is real: no buildings, no roads, just river forest a few minutes from the confluence that defines Belgrade's entire setting.