Dalmatia

Dalmatia is the historical region running along Croatia's central and southern Adriatic coast, a narrow strip of land backed by the Dinaric Alps and fronted by roughly seventy-nine islands and hundreds of smaller islets. It stretches for more than 375 kilometers, from the island of Rab in the north down toward the Bay of Kotor, narrowing from about 50 kilometers wide in the north to only a few kilometers in its southernmost reaches.

The region takes its name from the Illyrian Delmatae tribe, who settled here around 1000 BC before Rome absorbed the coast as the province of Dalmatia. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire the coast passed through Ostrogothic and then Byzantine control, before Croats and other Slavic peoples settled here from the 7th century onward. From the Middle Ages, control of Dalmatia was repeatedly contested between Byzantium, Hungary, Venice and the Ottoman Empire, but no power held it longer than the Republic of Venice, which ruled most of the coast between 1409 and 1797; further south, Dubrovnik stayed independent as the Republic of Ragusa from 1358 to 1808.

After Venice's fall, Dalmatia briefly belonged to Napoleon's Illyrian Provinces before passing to the Austrian Empire as the Kingdom of Dalmatia from 1815 to 1918. It then became part of the new Yugoslav state, remained so through the 20th century, and joined independent Croatia in 1991.

Split, the region's largest city and built around the Roman emperor Diocletian's retirement palace, remains the natural gateway to Dalmatia's islands and coastline — many gulet cruises from Split call in here to begin exploring the wider region, from Trogir and Šibenik in the north to Hvar, Korčula and Dubrovnik further south.