Krka National Park

Krka National Park protects a 109-square-kilometer stretch of the Krka River between Skradin and Knin, in Šibenik-Knin County. Established in 1985 as Croatia's seventh national park, it is built around a series of travertine waterfalls that step down through karst gorges toward the Adriatic.

The best known of these, Skradinski Buk, spreads across roughly 400 meters with a combined drop of about 46 meters over seventeen cascades — one of the largest travertine cascade systems in Europe, and the reason most visitors enter the park through the riverside town of Skradin.

Two monasteries sit within the park's boundaries: the Serbian Orthodox Krka Monastery, founded in 1345 near Roški Slap, and the Franciscan Visovac Monastery, built in 1445 on a small island in the middle of the river. The park is also a serious biodiversity site, home to more than 860 recorded plant species, 222 bird species, and 18 species of fish, several found nowhere else.

Since boats cannot sail directly into the protected river system, Krka is normally reached from the coast — for gulets based in Šibenik, it is one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet charter from Sibenik, usually as a day excursion from a mooring near Skradin.