Kastela

Kaštela is a city in its own right — the ninth-largest in Croatia by population and the second-largest settlement in Split-Dalmatia County after Split itself — occupying the coastline directly between Split and Trogir, so close to Split that the two built-up areas run almost into one another. Split Airport, Croatia's second-busiest, sits inside Kaštela's boundaries, in the settlement of Kaštel Štafilić, which means most visitors to central Dalmatia land here before they see anything else, usually without registering that they have arrived in a separate city.

Seven Settlements, Sixteen Castles

What is now a single administrative city grew out of seven separate coastal settlements, strung along around 20 kilometres of shore and still known individually: Kaštel Sućurac (closest to Split), Kaštel Gomilica, Kaštel Kambelovac, Kaštel Lukšić, Kaštel Stari, Kaštel Novi and Kaštel Štafilić (nearest Trogir). Each grew around a fortified residence built by noble families from Split and Trogir. From the late 14th century onwards, sixteen such castles and fortified mansions went up along this shore; roughly seven of them attracted enough peasant housing inside or beside their walls to turn into permanent villages, and it is those seven that survive as the settlements of today.

The motive was Ottoman pressure on the hinterland. Landowners whose fields lay inland moved their households down onto the water, where the sea covered one flank and the Kozjak ridge the other, and where a boat offered a way out. Among the best documented are the Glavica fort, built in 1392 for the archbishop of Split at what became Kaštel Sućurac; the Rošanić castle of 1482; the Ćipiko castle of 1512; and the Vitturi castle of 1564 at Kaštel Lukšić.

The most unusual of them stands at Kaštel Gomilica, where Benedictine nuns from Split — landowners here since a donation by King Zvonimir in 1078 — completed the fortified settlement of Kaštilac on a small offshore reef in 1545. It is reached by a low arched stone bridge, has a square plan with a tower over the entrance, and later took in refugees from villages burned in raids. The tower had lost any military purpose by the 17th century, and the tightly packed stone lanes behind it are among the most atmospheric in Dalmatia.

That stage-set quality has since been put to literal use: Kaštilac and the lanes around it stood in for the Free City of Braavos in the fifth season of Game of Thrones, filmed here in 2014, including the waterfront scenes in which Arya Stark sells oysters. It remains a lived-in residential quarter rather than a monument, and local tradition holds that the oak in front of the nearby church is more than seven hundred years old.

From Venetian Rule to a Single City

The seven settlements stayed legally distinct for centuries. Venice governed this coast until 1797, after which Kaštela passed to Habsburg Austria, then to Napoleon's Illyrian Provinces between 1806 and 1813, and back to Austrian administration from 1815. A reorganisation in 1822 began drawing the settlements together, and Kaštel Lukšić and Kaštel Kambelovac formally merged in 1847, but a single municipality covering all seven came only in the late 20th century, with city status following after Croatian independence. The administrative centre today is at Kaštel Sućurac.

The 2021 census counted 37,794 residents across the seven, spread fairly evenly: around 2,800 in Kaštel Štafilić at the lower end, and close to 7,000 in Kaštel Stari and about 6,500 in Kaštel Sućurac at the top. The economy divides along the same east-west line as the settlements. The eastern end, nearest Split, carries the heavy industry — cement works, chemical production and aluminium processing — while the western settlements kept their fields and, more recently, their tourism. A continuous waterfront promenade of roughly 8 kilometres links the old cores, and walking it is the easiest way to grasp how seven villages became one city.

Zinfandel's Birthplace and a 1,500-Year-Old Olive

Kaštela's most surprising claim is a genetic one. In 2001, DNA profiling carried out by Carole Meredith of the University of California, Davis, working with Ivan Pejić and Edi Maletić of the University of Zagreb, established that California's Zinfandel, southern Italy's Primitivo and an almost-vanished Dalmatian grape called Crljenak Kaštelanski — literally "the red of Kaštela" — are one and the same variety. The match came from nine surviving vines in the vineyard of a local grower at Kaštel Novi — the variety had been all but abandoned in its homeland. Its older documented name, Tribidrag, appears in Croatian records as far back as 1444, and it survives in Montenegro as Kratošija, and from those few remaining plants cultivation had grown to around 2,000 vines by 2008 and has kept expanding since, so the grape that built a large part of the Californian wine industry is once again planted where it started.

A second local landmark is older still. In Kaštel Štafilić, in the grounds of a kindergarten, stands an olive tree reckoned at roughly 1,500 years old, with a trunk six metres in girth, a crown twenty-two metres across and a root system spreading over about a hundred metres. It has no single taproot, and the stock is thought to have been brought here from southern Italy or Greece in antiquity.

Kaštel Lukšić, meanwhile, carries the region's best-known story: the legend of Miljenko and Dobrila, children of the feuding Rušinić and Vitturi families, set in the second half of the 17th century and told locally as Dalmatia's answer to Romeo and Juliet. The story has been reworked repeatedly in Croatian literature and opera, and the lovers' graves are shown in the church of St John on Rušinac. The Vitturi castle itself — begun by the Trogir noblemen Nikola and Jerolim Vitturi at the end of the 15th century to shelter their household and the villagers of Ostrog, and completed in 1564 with a residential block and two defensive towers — now houses the town museum and serves as the settlement's cultural centre, and the classicist park laid out beside it in the later 18th century has been protected as a monument of park architecture since 1968.

Between Kozjak and the Bay

The whole city is hemmed in by Mount Kozjak, whose highest point, Veliki vrh, reaches 779 metres directly above Kaštel Gomilica and carries some 80 kilometres of marked trails, four mountain lodges and views across the bay to Split, Trogir and the islands. Chapels and archaeological sites are scattered across its summits and slopes, so the walking is rarely just walking. Below it, Kaštela Bay is sheltered from most directions, which is what made this shore usable in the first place.

The bay has been settled far longer than the castles suggest. At its head stood Salona, capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia and the largest city on this coast in antiquity, with the Kaštela shore as its immediate hinterland; prehistoric hillforts sit on the slopes above, and Greek and Roman traces turn up along the waterfront. The Jadro river, which rises just inland, was tapped by a Roman aqueduct that fed Salona and later Diocletian's palace, and it still supplies drinking water to both Kaštela and Split today.

For boats the appeal is practical rather than dramatic: a large modern marina, safe anchorages across a bay shut off from open-sea swell, and an airport a few minutes from the water. The coastline is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet from Split — the old fortified cores, pebble beaches and small harbours sit only a short sail from the city, making Kaštela an easy first or last stop on a Split-based itinerary.