Zadar Attractions

Zadar stacks three thousand years into a peninsula six hundred metres across, and the layers are visible rather than buried. The forum was laid out under Augustus and never built over, so it survives as an open paved square scattered with column bases, a sacrificial pillar still standing at one corner. On its rubble sits St Donatus, a round ninth-century church whose walls reuse Roman stone, and beside that the cathedral of St Anastasia, whose bell tower gives the view over the roofs. The Archaeological Museum and the Museum of Ancient Glass hold what has come out of the ground; the Gold and Silver of Zadar collection holds the reliquaries the city kept through the sieges.

The defences are the other half of the story. Zadar's Venetian land walls, the Land Gate of 1543 among them, were inscribed by UNESCO in 2017 as part of the Venetian Works of Defence, and the circuit still encloses the peninsula with Five Wells Square and the Queen Jelena Madijevka park sitting on top of the bastion. At the western tip the city added something entirely modern: the Sea Organ, which plays as the swell pushes air through pipes under the marble steps, and the Greeting to the Sun beside it. They have become the reason a large share of visitors are on the waterfront at sunset, which Zadar has advertised since Alfred Hitchcock called it the finest he had seen.