Split
Split is a city where the Roman Empire never quite ended. Diocletian's Palace — built as a retirement estate for one emperor, completed in 305 CE — became, after refugees from a sacked neighbouring city moved in, the living core of a modern Dalmatian town. Today around 3,000 people still sleep, cook and hang laundry inside those walls. You walk through a fourth-century gate to find a bar, a cathedral converted from an imperial mausoleum, and someone's cat asleep on a sphinx of black Egyptian granite.
Split sits on the Dalmatian coast, roughly midway down Croatia, and works both as a destination in its own right and as a departure point for the islands. The old town is compact enough to cover on foot in an afternoon, deep enough to keep pulling you back.
💛 What travellers fall for
Return visitors tend to develop specific loyalties: a table on the Peristyle at dusk when the stone goes gold, the free walk through the palace cellars from the Bronze Gate to that same square, the Meštrović Gallery on a quiet morning when the garden is almost empty. The city rewards wandering without a plan more than it rewards a checklist.
How Split came to be
Split's origins sit with a small Greek colony called Aspálathos, founded in the third or second century BCE. The city as it stands, though, begins with Diocletian — a Dalmatian-born soldier who rose to become one of Rome's most powerful emperors, ruled 284–305 CE, then did something almost no emperor had done: voluntarily abdicated. He spent his final years in the palace he'd spent a decade building on his home coast, dying there in 316.
The palace sat relatively quiet until the seventh century, when Avars and Slavs destroyed nearby Salona. Its refugees moved inside the walls and organised a city around the old imperial corridors. Venice, Hungary-Croatia and Austria each held the city in turn before it became part of Yugoslavia and, in 1992, Croatia. UNESCO recognised the palace complex in 1979.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Summers are hot and dry, with July and August regularly reaching the mid-30s Celsius along the waterfront. Spring and autumn are mild and often clear — ideal walking weather. Winters are cool and occasionally rainy but rarely harsh.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.