Split Travel Guide

Diocletian's Palace is the living core of Split: built around AD 305 as the Roman emperor's retirement residence, a fortified seafront city that never lost its walls - people simply moved in, and about 3,000 still live inside, making it the only Roman palace of its scale continuously inhabited since it was built; the whole old town was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979. Four gates - Golden, Silver, Iron and Brass - stand open around the clock and the palace itself is free; you pay only for a few interiors: the Cathedral of St Domnius, converted from Diocletian's own mausoleum in a neat historical irony - he persecuted the Christians whose executed bishop it now honours - the 183-step Romanesque bell tower, the best-preserved late-Roman substructures, and the Temple of Jupiter. The substructures doubled as the Meereen dragon pit in Game of Thrones. Outside the Golden Gate stands an 8.5-metre bronze of Gregory of Nin by Croatia's great sculptor Ivan Mestrovic, made in 1929, whose left big toe is polished bright because rubbing it is said to bring luck and guarantee your return to Split.

The bell tower of the Cathedral of St Domnius is the tallest structure in Split's old town, its 57 metres defining the skyline for centuries and making it the highest bell tower in Dalmatia. It belongs to the cathedral converted from the mausoleum of the Roman emperor Diocletian - not to a defensive bastion by the palace's Golden Gate. Work began in the mid-13th century and dragged on for some 300 years, only topping out in the mid-16th, one of the slowest-built buildings in Split (the whole palace took ten years); it is mostly Romanesque with Gothic and Renaissance layers added floor by floor, and was extensively rebuilt between 1890 and 1908. Two stone lions guard the tower's base portal, above which a small sarcophagus holds the remains of two daughters of Bela IV, king of Hungary and Croatia, who died of plague after the family fled the Mongol invasion of 1241. The climb is about 183 steps (about EUR 7) up a mix of broad stone stairs and narrow metal treads, and the top gives 360-degree views over the palace's terracotta roofs, the old town, the harbour, the Adriatic and the offshore islands - Split's classic vantage point.

The Temple of Jupiter is one of the best-preserved Roman buildings inside Diocletian's Palace, built between AD 295 and 305 at the end of a narrow lane west of the Peristyle, facing the Cathedral of St Domnius. Dedicated to Jupiter, king of the Roman gods, it became the Baptistery of St John from around the 6th century, layering Roman and early Christian history in one space - the palace in miniature, each new faith reusing what the last had built. Its finest feature is the superbly preserved barrel-vaulted ceiling, reckoned among the most beautiful of its kind in Europe; at the entrance stands a black granite sphinx, one of twelve Diocletian brought from Egypt and the only one with its head intact, the rest destroyed as Christianity took hold, with another surviving in fragments inside. The baptismal font carries the earliest known stone carving of a Croatian king, and a small crypt below is dedicated to St Thomas. Admission is about EUR 3-4, or take a combination ticket with the cathedral, crypt and treasury from the desk beside the Peristyle. At 8am, right after opening, the place is almost empty - the best hour for the carved doorframe and the sphinx.

Hvar lies off the Dalmatian coast between Brac and Korcula, about 68 km long, 4-11 km wide and 297 square kilometres - Croatia's fourth-largest island and its sunniest, with roughly 2,726-2,800 hours of sunshine a year against Split and Saint-Tropez; hotels once promised a free stay on any sunless day. Human history here runs from the Neolithic Grapceva cave and the Bronze Age 'Hvar culture' to the Greek colony of Pharos founded in 384 BC on the eastern shore - today's Stari Grad, one of Europe's oldest towns - whose Pharos Inscription recording a treaty with the Illyrians is among Croatia's oldest written documents. The Greek field divisions on the Stari Grad Plain have kept the same dry-stone geometry for over two millennia and are still farmed, inscribed by UNESCO in 2008 as a surviving ancient Greek land-division system. The hillsides grow lavender at its June peak, vines and olives, with the southern slopes' plavac mali red and posip white among Croatia's best wines. Hvar Town is Croatia's nightlife capital, with mid-July Yacht Week and clubs running past dawn setting the peak-season tone, while Stari Grad and Jelsa offer the opposite, entirely quiet face. Just offshore to the southwest, the 21 islets of the Pakleni Islands, Palmizana and its bays among them, are a 15-minute water-taxi ride.