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Croatia is a country of 3.9 million people on the eastern Adriatic that has given the world the necktie, the mechanical pencil and the Dalmatian dog, and that counts 1,244 islands, islets and rocks along its coast. The 18 facts below each carry the detail that makes them checkable: the date on the patent, the name on the museum, the number the hydrographic institute actually uses. Croatia also dropped the kuna on 1 January 2023 and joined the Schengen area the same day, which quietly makes a lot of older writing about the country wrong.
1. Croatia has 1,244 islands, islets and rocks, not 1,300
Croatia has 1,244 landforms off its coast, and the round numbers you usually see are approximations of that figure. The Croatian Hydrographic Institute splits them into 78 islands, 524 islets and 642 rocks and reefs.
The split is not arbitrary. Anything over 1 square kilometre counts as an island, anything between 0.1 and 1 square kilometre is an islet, and anything smaller is a rock. Cres and Krk are the two largest, each covering about 405 square kilometres (156 sq mi). Only 47 of the 1,244 have anyone living on them permanently, which is why a boat between two of the bigger islands can pass a dozen uninhabited ones on the way.
2. The kuna is gone, but the animal it was named after is on the €1 coin
Croatia adopted the euro on 1 January 2023 at a fixed rate of 7.53450 kuna to €1, and the kuna stopped being legal tender two weeks later when the dual-circulation period ended on 14 January. The word kuna means marten, and the animal is there because medieval tribute in this part of Europe was paid in marten pelts.
The marten survived the currency change. Croatia’s national side of the €1 coin shows a stylised marten on the chequerboard, the 50, 20 and 10 cent coins show Nikola Tesla, and the 5, 2 and 1 cent coins carry the letters Ⱈ and Ⱃ in Glagolitic script. Anyone quoting you a price in kuna is working from information more than three years out of date.
3. The necktie comes from Croatia, and Croatia has a day for it
The necktie descends from the neckcloth worn by Croatian soldiers in French service during the Thirty Years’ War, and the French name for it, cravate, is their pronunciation of Croate. The cloth was practical before it was decorative: it knotted a collar shut and marked which unit a man belonged to.
Croatia marks the connection every 18 October, and the date was chosen for a stunt. On 18 October 2003 the Zagreb institute Academia Cravatica tied an 808 m (2,650 ft) red cravat around the Roman amphitheatre in Pula, a work by Marijan Bušić that took more than 300 hours of sewing and 450 kg of fabric. Croatia’s parliament adopted 18 October as Cravat Day in 2008, five years after the knot was tied.
4. Nikola Tesla was born in a Croatian village, and the house is a museum
Nikola Tesla was born on 10 July 1856 in Smiljan, a village in the Lika region near Gospić, where his father served as an Orthodox priest. Tesla’s birth house still stands and now forms the centre of the Nikola Tesla Memorial Centre, run by the Lika Museum in Gospić and opened on the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2006.
Entry costs €10 (about $12, £9) for adults, €6 (about $7, £5) for children over 7, students and pensioners, and €20 (about $23, £17) for a family ticket. Working models of Tesla’s inventions are demonstrated on site rather than displayed behind glass, which is the reason to make the detour rather than read the plaque.
5. Dubrovnik played King’s Landing and Klis played Meereen, and neither kept the sets
Dubrovnik’s walled old town stood in for King’s Landing through most of Game of Thrones, and Klis Fortress above Split supplied the exteriors of Meereen in seasons 4 and 5. Both are real places that predate the series by several centuries, and neither has anything left from the production.
What the camera showed at Klis was the Venetian fortress rebuilt after 1648, extended digitally in every direction to become a city. In Dubrovnik the Jesuit staircase, the Rector’s Palace and the harbour are all in daily civic use. The one physical trace is in Split, where the cellars of Diocletian’s Palace played Daenerys’s dragon vault and are open on a normal museum ticket.
6. Zadar’s Sea Organ is a 70-metre instrument tuned to Dalmatian harmony
Zadar’s Sea Organ is a set of marble steps on the waterfront with 35 polyethylene pipes underneath, and the Adriatic plays it. The installation runs about 70 m (229.7 ft) along the quay and was completed in 2005 to a design by the architect Nikola Bašić.
The tuning is the part most descriptions leave out. The 35 pipes are arranged in seven groups of five, and the chords they produce follow the harmonic pattern of klapa, the Dalmatian close-harmony singing tradition. Waves push air through the pipes, so the volume and the rhythm change with the swell and never repeat. The work won the European Prize for Urban Public Space in 2006.
7. The Dalmatian dog is Croatian, and there is a date on the paperwork
The Dalmatian takes its name from Dalmatia and the Fédération Cynologique Internationale recognises Croatia as the breed’s country of origin. The Dalmatian’s paper trail starts in the church chronicles of the Đakovo diocese, where Bishop Petar Bakić described the dog as “Canis Dalmaticus” in 1719, with a second chronicle entry by Andreas Keczkeméty in 1739.
The pictures are older than the text. An altar painting in Veli Lošinj dated to between 1600 and 1630 shows a spotted dog of the type, and a fresco at Zaostrog shows another. Spotting an actual Dalmatian on the Dalmatian coast, on the other hand, takes patience: the breed is far more common abroad than at home.
8. The oldest text naming Croatia in Croatian is in Zagreb, not on Krk
The Baška Tablet is a limestone slab carved around 1100 in the Glagolitic alphabet, and it holds the first mention of a Croatian king in the Croatian language, recording King Zvonimir’s gift of land to a Benedictine abbey. It was found on 15 September 1851 by Petar Dorčić during paving work in the church of St Lucy at Jurandvor, near Baška on the island of Krk.
The slab you see in the church today is a replica. The original, 199 cm long, 99.5 cm high and weighing about 800 kg, is in the atrium of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Zagreb, where it can be seen without a ticket.
9. Krapina holds the largest single collection of Neanderthal fossils anywhere
Krapina in Hrvatsko zagorje produced about 900 Neanderthal fossil fragments from more than 70 individuals, the richest single Neanderthal site in the world. The geologist and palaeontologist Dragutin Gorjanović-Kramberger excavated the Hušnjakovo rock shelter between 1899 and 1905 and also found more than a thousand stone tools alongside the bones.
The remains date to roughly 130,000 to 120,000 years ago. The Krapina Neanderthal Museum stands on the site itself, charges €10 (about $12, £9) for adults and €5 (about $6, £4) for children, and closes on Mondays. Gorjanović-Kramberger’s own insistence on recording exactly where each fragment lay is one reason the collection is still scientifically useful more than a century later.
10. The mechanical pencil was patented by a Croatian engineer in January 1906
Slavoljub Eduard Penkala patented the mechanical pencil at the Budapest patent office on 24 January 1906, filing it under the name “automatic pencil”. Penkala followed it in 1907 with the first solid-ink fountain pen and opened a workshop in Zagreb the same year.
The business outgrew the workshop quickly. Penkala went into partnership with the industrialist Edmund Moster, and the Penkala-Moster factory, formally founded in Zagreb in 1911, became one of the largest writing-instrument producers in the world, exporting to more than 70 countries. The Croatian word for a ballpoint pen is still penkala.
11. The Pula Arena is the only Roman amphitheatre with all four side towers standing
Pula’s Roman amphitheatre is the only one anywhere that still has all four of its side towers and all three Roman architectural orders preserved. The arena is the sixth largest surviving Roman amphitheatre, held more than 20,000 spectators, and reached its final form under Vespasian, with completion in 81 AD under Titus.
The towers are the reason the outer wall looks unbroken from the harbour. Each held a cistern that supplied water to the arena and to the awning system, and their survival is what makes the building read as complete rather than as a ruin. It is still a working venue: the Pula Film Festival has used it since 1954.
12. Hum has about 30 residents and elects its leader by carving a stick
Hum, in inland Istria, is a walled settlement of roughly 30 people that is widely called the world’s smallest town. Its walls enclose a space about 100 m (328.1 ft) long and 30 m (98.4 ft) wide, containing two streets, three rows of stone houses, a church and a loggia.
The election is the thing worth travelling for. Once a year the men of the parish gather in the town loggia and elect a head for the following twelve months by cutting notches into a wooden voting stick with a knife, a practice that has outlasted every empire that has governed Istria. Hum also makes biska, a mistletoe brandy, under a recipe the town dates to the same era.
13. Two Roman emperors were born in what is now Vinkovci
Vinkovci in eastern Croatia was the Roman colony of Cibalae, and two 4th-century emperors were born there: Valentinian I in 321 and his younger brother Valens in 328. Valentinian was proclaimed emperor in 364 and immediately made Valens his co-emperor, splitting the empire between west and east.
Valens is the one whose death has a name attached to it. He was killed at Adrianople in 378 in a defeat by the Goths that historians treat as a turning point in the empire’s decline. Vinkovci’s other claim, that it is the oldest continuously inhabited town in Europe, rests on about 8,000 years of settlement evidence and is contested by towns such as Athens, Argos and Plovdiv, so the emperors are the firmer fact.
14. The world-record white truffle came out of Istria and was eaten, not sold
Giancarlo Zigante and his dog Diana found a white truffle weighing 1.31 kg near Buje in Istria on 2 November 1999, and it entered the Guinness Book of Records as the largest ever found. Zigante named it Millennium and did the opposite of what the market expected.
Rather than auctioning it, he had a bronze cast made and then cooked the truffle for a dinner of about a hundred guests in Istria, to make the point that the record belonged to the region rather than to a collector. The bronze copy is on display at the Zigante shop in Livade, in the Istrian interior inland from Rovinj and Poreč. The record has since been beaten by an Italian find.
15. Ojkanje singing is on UNESCO’s urgent list, and each song lasts one breath
Ojkanje is a two-part singing style from the Dalmatian hinterland, inscribed in 2010 on UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. The voice is shaken in the throat, and a song lasts exactly as long as the lead singer can hold a single breath.
The urgent listing is not decoration. It records that the chain of transmission has broken: the singers who know the style are mostly elderly, and rural depopulation has taken the occasions for it away. Croatia’s other UNESCO-recognised traditions are in better health, including klapa singing, the Sinjska alka horsemen’s tournament, gingerbread craft from the north of the country and lace made in Lepoglava, Hvar and Pag.
16. National and nature parks cover about a tenth of Croatia
Croatia’s national and nature parks together take in 5,930 square kilometres (2,289.6 sq mi), roughly 10% of the country’s land area. There are 8 national parks, of which Plitvice Lakes is both the oldest and a UNESCO World Heritage site, and 12 nature parks.
The most recent addition came after a long gap. Dinara was declared Croatia’s twelfth nature park in February 2021, covering nearly 63,000 hectares of the Dinara, Troglav and Kamešnica massifs and the upper Cetina, and it was the first new protected area of its category in more than two decades.
17. The Maglite was invented by a Croatian-American who grew up on Zlarin
Anthony Maglica was born in New York in November 1930 to Croatian parents and grew up on the island of Zlarin, off Šibenik, before returning to the United States in 1950. Maglica founded Mag Instrument in 1955 with $125, enough for a down payment on a lathe, and ran it as a precision machine shop for more than twenty years.
The flashlight came later. Maglica launched the Maglite in 1979, built from anodised aluminium rather than plastic, and it became standard issue for American police forces. Production has stayed in California.
18. Croatia reached a World Cup final with fewer than four million people
Croatia finished runner-up at the 2018 World Cup and third at the 2022 World Cup, from a population of about 3.9 million at the 2021 census. Only Uruguay has reached a men’s World Cup final with a smaller population.
The route in 2018 tells you something about the squad. Croatia won three consecutive knockout ties that went to extra time, two of them on penalties, and played 90 minutes more football than France before the final. The 2022 side beat Brazil on penalties in the quarter-final before taking third place.
Croatia facts people get wrong
Five claims about Croatia circulate widely and are either out of date or overstated. Each is worth correcting before you plan a trip around it.
- The kuna no longer exists. Croatia has used the euro since 1 January 2023 and the kuna stopped being accepted on 14 January 2023. Guides that tell you to change money into kuna, or that quote a museum ticket in kuna, are describing a country that has not existed for three years.
- Croatia is no longer a cheap Adriatic destination. Coastal prices in July and August sit close to Italian and Greek levels, and Dubrovnik is the most expensive place in the country. Shoulder season and the interior are where the savings are, as the breakdown of prices in Croatia sets out.
- The “1,300 islands” figure is a rounding. The Hydrographic Institute counts 1,244 islands, islets and rocks, and 47 of them are inhabited.
- Hum’s “world’s smallest town” title is a claim, not a measurement. It rests on Hum keeping the status, the walls and the elected head of a town while having about 30 residents, which is a fair description and not an official record.
- Croatia’s borders changed in 2023 in a way that affects your passport. Croatia joined the Schengen area on 1 January 2023 for land and sea borders and on 26 March 2023 for air, so days spent there count against the 90 days in any 180 that visa-free visitors are allowed across Schengen as a whole. Land crossings to Slovenia and Hungary no longer have routine passport checks; crossings to Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Serbia still do.
Frequently asked questions about Croatia
How did Croatia get its name?
Croatia is named after the Croats, the Slavic group that settled the territory between the 6th and 9th centuries, and the native form Hrvatska comes from Hrvati. The earliest surviving inscription using the name in the local language is the Baška Tablet of around 1100. Croatian rulers united the territories in the 9th and 10th centuries; a personal union with Hungary followed in 1102, Habsburg rule from 1527, Yugoslavia from 1918, and independence in 1991.
What language do people speak in Croatia?
Croatian is the official language, a South Slavic language written in the Latin alphabet and mutually intelligible with Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin. Standard Croatian is based on the Štokavian dialect, while Čakavian survives along the coast and on the islands and Kajkavian around Zagreb and the north. English is widely spoken in cities and tourist areas and much less so in inland villages. Italian has co-official status in parts of Istria.
What is the symbol of Croatia?
The red and white chequerboard, the šahovnica, is Croatia’s defining symbol and has represented the country since at least the 15th century. The modern coat of arms sets the chequerboard below five smaller shields for the historical regions of Croatia proper, Dubrovnik, Dalmatia, Istria and Slavonia. The chequerboard also appears on every Croatian euro coin, behind the marten, Tesla and the Glagolitic letters.
Does Croatia have castles?
Croatia has castle museums you can walk into, concentrated in Hrvatsko zagorje north of Zagreb and along the Dalmatian and Istrian coast. Trakošćan opens every day of the year bar Christmas and Easter, Klis Fortress above Split is the one with a city bus running to its gate, and Dubovac in Karlovac is the cheapest at €3 (about $4, £3). The full list, with 2026 prices and closed days, is in the guide to castles in Croatia.
What are Croatia’s public holidays?
Croatia has 14 public holidays, set by the Holidays, Memorial Days and Non-Working Days Act, and 11 of them fall on fixed dates. Those 11 are New Year’s Day, Epiphany on 6 January, Labour Day on 1 May, Statehood Day on 30 May, Anti-Fascist Struggle Day on 22 June, Victory Day on 5 August, Assumption on 15 August, All Saints’ Day on 1 November, Remembrance Day on 18 November, Christmas Day on 25 December and St Stephen’s Day on 26 December. The three that move are Easter Sunday, Easter Monday and Corpus Christi. Memorial days are a separate category and are normal working days. The dates and what closes on each are listed under holiday dates in Croatia.
Do you need a car to see Croatia?
A car is what most of these facts sit behind, because the museums attached to them are scattered. Smiljan, Krapina, Vinkovci and Livade are all in places the coastal buses do not reach, and a single inland loop covers three of them. Rates from the Zagreb and Split airport desks are worth comparing across suppliers on DiscoverCars before you commit to one. For data on the road, an Airalo eSIM installs on one phone before you land, which is simpler than a local SIM for a trip of a week or two.
WonderfulWanderings Pro Tips
Four of these facts come with something practical attached, and they are listed below.
- Check the museum’s own site before quoting a Croatian price. Every euro figure on this page was taken from the venue in 2026, and a large share of Croatian travel writing still carries kuna prices from before January 2023 or euro conversions of them.
- See the Baška Tablet in Zagreb rather than on Krk. The Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts keeps the original in its atrium and does not charge for it; the church at Jurandvor holds a replica.
- Visit Krapina and Trakošćan on the same day, but not on a Monday. Both sit in Hrvatsko zagorje within an hour of each other, and the Krapina Neanderthal Museum closes on Mondays while Trakošćan does not.
- Go to the Sea Organ when the sea is up, not when it is flat. The pipes are driven by wave energy, so a calm evening produces almost nothing while a day of southerly wind makes the whole quay sound.
About the author. This guide is written and maintained by the Wonderful Wanderings editorial team. Wonderful Wanderings was founded in 2012 by Sofie Couwenbergh, and the team covers Croatia for independent travellers, from the island count and the Glagolitic alphabet to the museums, tours and car hire that turn a fact into a day out. Each figure on this page was checked against the institution that publishes it, and the page is updated when prices, dates and rules change.
