We had originally planned on hitting up the Croatian coast earlier in our trip, but when our good friends said they were interested in visiting in December, we couldn’t pass that up. Croatia is the hot new place in terms of tourism, but the majority of those visitors come during the summer months, not December. As you can probably guess, the pros of coming during the winter is that it’s cheaper, way less crowded and great weather compared to back home. The cons are no beach and the restaurants/activities are closed or have modified hours.
We arrived a couple of days before our friends in Split. We didn’t want to do too much without them, so for the first couple of days we did a lot of walking and relaxing along the coast. Our AirBnb was just steps away from Marjan Hill, which is a huge forested area that overlooks Split and the Adriatic. The hill offers up some seriously good views and pictures.
Thankfully, our friends arrived after a couple of days because we were starting to get itchy wanting to see some of the sites. The most impressive and must see location in Split is Diocletian’s Palace in the city’s historic center. We’ve been to a lot of cities with a lot of ruins and these are some of the most well-preserved ones we’ve seen in all of Europe. This might be why HBO and Game of Thrones chose this location for some filming. The palace is located in Peristil Square, which was the original Roman court where Diocletian made public appearances. The whole surrounding area is quite the sight. The rest of our time in Split was dedicated to wandering the streets of Old Town and stopping in whatever establishment would serve us some good food and drinks.
On Monday we took a day trip to Stari Grad, which is on the island of Hvar. Hvar is a another very popular destination for tourists during the summer months but we pretty much had the place to ourselves in December. We kept commenting how we understood how not being able to get in the water is a downfall, but it’s a shame more people don’t come here during the winter because it’s still about 60+ degrees with no people cluttering the streets and restaurants.
