Plitvice Lakes National Park

Plitvice Lakes National Park is Croatia's oldest and largest national park, established on 8 April 1949 and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1979 for its sixteen cascading, travertine-dammed lakes and waterfalls. It is a genuinely spectacular place — but it is worth being clear about where it actually is: the park sits inland, in the karst hills of Lika, split mostly between Lika-Senj County and a smaller part of Karlovac County, well over 100 kilometres from the sea. It is not part of the Zadar coast, has no anchorage, and cannot be reached by boat.

The park's colour comes from a natural process that is still ongoing: mosses, algae and bacteria deposit calcium carbonate that builds travertine barriers between the lakes at a rate of roughly a centimetre a year, separating the water into pools and waterfalls whose colour shifts from turquoise to deep green depending on light and mineral content. The park covers just under 300 square kilometres of mixed beech and coniferous forest, home to brown bears, wolves and lynx as well as more than 160 recorded bird species. It has drawn tourists since the late 19th century, when hotels were first built for visiting Austrian aristocracy, and by the 1980s it was one of the most-visited sites in the former Yugoslavia — a status interrupted violently in March 1991, when the park was the site of the first fatal clash of the Croatian War of Independence, and occupied until Croatian forces regained the area in 1995. Today the lakes draw well over a million visitors a year, with daily numbers capped in peak summer to protect the ecosystem.

Plitvice sits nowhere near the coast, so unlike one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet cruise in Croatia, it can only be reached by road — typically as a full-day car or bus excursion from Zadar, a trip of around 120 kilometres and roughly an hour and a half to two hours each way.