Brijuni National Park

Brijuni National Park is a group of islands off Istria's west coast, separated from the mainland by the roughly 2-mile-wide Fažana Channel. It's been a national park since 1983, but the reason most people have heard of it has less to do with nature and more to do with who used to live there.

From 1949 onward, the islands served as a residence for Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito, who first visited in 1947 and made the "White Villa" his official residence from 1953. He spent an average of four months a year here until his last stay in 1979, and used the islands to host a long list of foreign leaders and celebrities. The most significant meeting happened in 1956, when Tito met with Nehru and Nasser on Brijuni to draft the Brioni Declaration, the founding document of the Non-Aligned Movement.

The largest island, Veliki Brijun, still carries traces of that era — a safari park established in 1978 to house exotic animals gifted to Tito by visiting heads of state, along with the ruins of a Roman villa rustica and roughly 600 plant species across the island. Mali Brijun, the second-largest island, has Fort Minor, an Austro-Hungarian fortress finished at the end of the 19th century that was, at 175 by 90 meters, the largest fortification the empire built on the Adriatic — designed to house 12 officers and 530 soldiers. Since 2001 it's also been home to the Ulysses Theatre, an open-air summer stage founded by actor Rade Šerbedžija that stages performances inside the old fort's amphitheatres.

Brijuni's other claim to fame predates all of it by about 100 million years: more than 200 dinosaur footprints have been documented across four sites on Veliki Brijun, left by sauropods, theropods and ornithopods during the Cretaceous period. The first prints were spotted back in 1925, making Brijuni one of the oldest documented dinosaur track sites in Croatia.

Because it's a short hop from the Istrian coast, Brijuni is best reached during a gulet cruise along the Croatia coast rather than as a standalone day trip from inland.