Croatia

Dubrovnik is beautiful and full. Go at 7am or not at all

Croatia has more than a thousand islands and one very famous walled city, and the ratio of attention between them is completely wrong. Dubrovnik gets the cruise ships, the Game of Thrones tours and the queues. It is genuinely stunning at dawn and genuinely miserable at noon in August. Everything else on that coastline is quieter and often better.

Split is a working city built inside a Roman emperor’s retirement palace, which should draw more visitors than it does. Hvar, Vis and Korcula each do a different version of island life. Inland, almost nobody goes, which means Plitvice’s waterfalls and the Istrian hill towns feel like a different country with a different price list.

The coast is rocky rather than sandy, the sea is startlingly clear, and the ferry network is good enough to island-hop without a plan. Shoulder season is the move here more than almost anywhere in Europe, because July and August turn a relaxed country into a logistics exercise.

Annual events and festivals

• Rijeka Carnival (Jan-Feb) — one of the largest carnivals in Europe, with a UNESCO-listed bell-ringers procession.
• Feast of St Blaise, Dubrovnik (3 Feb) — the patron saint day, and the one time Dubrovnik belongs to locals again.
• INmusic Festival, Zagreb (Jun) — the main rock and indie festival, held on lake islands.
• Motovun Film Festival (Jul) — independent cinema in a tiny Istrian hill town.
• Ultra Europe, Split (Jul) — enormous electronic festival that takes over the city then moves to the islands.
• Dubrovnik Summer Festival (Jul-Aug) — 45 days of theatre and music staged on the city walls and in courtyards.
• Sinjska Alka (Aug) — a 300-year-old knights tournament where riders spear a metal ring at full gallop.
• Outlook Festival, Pula (Aug-Sep) — bass music in an abandoned Austro-Hungarian fort.
• Vinkovci Autumn (Sep) — the biggest folklore festival in the country.
• Advent in Zagreb (Dec) — repeatedly voted Europe’s best Christmas market, and deservedly.