Travelling in Croatia: a coast of rented apartments and pitches

What the bed count says about a visit

The Croatian Bureau of Statistics counts accommodation twice over, once in units, which are rooms, apartments and camping pitches, and once in permanent beds. In 2025 there were 441 thousand units and 1.2 million permanent beds on the register. The category called holiday and other short-stay accommodation, which is where the apartment let by its owner sits, held 269 thousand of those units and 718 thousand of the beds, 61.9% of the national total. Camping sites and camping grounds held 89 thousand units and 266 thousand beds. Hotels and similar accommodation held 83 thousand units and 175 thousand beds, which is 15.0% of the beds available in the country.

Where the nights are actually spent

The nights follow the beds. Short-stay lettings took 49.2% of the 94.8 million nights sold in 2025, camping took 23.1%, and hotels took 27.7% on 15.0% of the beds, which is what a hotel does. Occupancy across all accommodation units averaged 59.9% over 2025 and 60.6% of permanent beds, up from 58.9 and 59.2% in 2024.

Why the capacity stopped growing

2025 broke a run of years in which the bed stock had grown. The register lost 1.4% of its units and 1.6% of its permanent beds against 2024, and the loss was entirely in the self-catering half: short-stay accommodation gave up 5,000 units and 14,000 beds, campsites gave up 2,000 units and 7,000 beds, while hotels added 1,000 units and 2,000 beds. Arrivals and nights both rose in the same year, by 2.2 and 1.2%, which is why occupancy went up while the country had fewer beds to sell.

Who fills the beds and for how long

Foreign visitors accounted for 85.1% of the 20.7 million arrivals recorded in 2025 and for 90.3% of the nights, and they stayed 4.9 nights per arrival against 3.0 for Croatians travelling at home. German visitors made 3.0 million arrivals and 21.0 million nights in 2025, 24.6% of all foreign nights, at an average of 6.9 nights each. After Germany the nights came from Slovenia at 9.4%, Austria at 8.8, Poland at 8.2, Czechia at 5.2, the United Kingdom at 4.5, Italy at 4.3, Hungary at 4.1, Slovakia at 3.5 and the Netherlands at 3.2. Nine of those ten markets are on the European mainland, which fits the campsites and the long stays.

Croatians made 3.1 million arrivals and 9.2 million nights in 2025, 14.9% of arrivals and 9.7% of nights. Domestic nights rose for a fifth consecutive year and supplied 489 thousand of the 1.1 million extra nights the country sold over 2024, which is 43.0% of the whole increase from under a tenth of the base. The destination Croatians chose most often was Zagreb, with 548 thousand domestic nights in 2025, ahead of every place on the sea; Crikvenica followed with 304 thousand, then Šibenik with 286 thousand, Zadar with 284 thousand, Mali Lošinj with 264 thousand and Rovinj with 253 thousand.

Age tells the same story again. Visitors aged fourteen and under took 17.5 million nights in 2025, 18.5% of the total; the next was the 35 to 44 group with 16.5 million. Children and their parents are the market, and school holidays set the calendar.

Why campsites carry so much of the coast

Istria took 5.0 million arrivals and 28.3 million nights in 2025, 24.1% of national arrivals and 29.9% of national nights, and camping alone accounted for 11.5 million of the county's nights, 40.4% of them. Short-stay lettings took another 31.6% there and hotels 27.9%. Germans took 10 million of Istria's foreign nights that year, 36.9%, followed by Austrians at 13.9%, Slovenes at 9.8, Italians at 5.9, the Dutch at 5.1, Poles at 4.8 and Czechs at 4.2.

The peninsula is built for arrival by road and by bicycle. Pula is the end point of the EuroVelo 9 cycle route, which starts at Gdańsk on the Baltic and runs through Poland, Czechia, Austria and Slovenia to get there. Inland the ground is wooded and hilly, with stone towns on the hilltops: Motovun above the Mirna valley, where a forest of about ten square kilometres holds 280 hectares of specially protected ground with moist soil and truffles, and where an international film festival has run since 1999; Grožnjan holds a three-week jazz festival every July.

Olives are the other Istrian trade that touches visitors. Croatia had 18,683 hectares of olive groves in 2018, most of them near the coast, yielding around 5,000 tonnes of oil a year, and a tree on Veli Brijun in the Brijuni islands has been dated at about 1,600 years old. Selling oil at the grove is what pushes some of the seasonal work, and some of the season, into the autumn.

When the coastal season begins and ends

June 2025 on its own produced 3.2 million arrivals and 14.3 million nights, 12.6% and 14.5% above June 2024, and foreign visitors took 92.5% of that month's nights. The reason the coast can absorb that is measurable in the climate record. At Hvar, over the normals for 1858 to 2024, July averages 25.2 °C and 371.6 hours of sunshine, with four days of rain and 22.0 mm of precipitation. December has 118.9 hours of sunshine, twelve days of rain and 101.4 mm. Thirteen July days and twelve August days reach 30 °C at that station, and no month between November and April reaches 25 °C at all.

Wind is the variable that changes a coastal day. The bora, called the bura on the coast, is a cold northeasterly recorded most often in the cooler months and has exceeded 50 metres per second. The sirocco, the jugo in Dalmatia, comes up from the south and carries a moderating influence off Africa into southern Dalmatia. In summer the mistral has a cooling effect on the coast and the islands.

The fixed points in the season are older than the statistics. Opatija on the Kvarner Gulf has taken visitors since the nineteenth century, when the aristocracy of Austria-Hungary came down to the sea. The Hvar Summer Festival runs from late June to late September. Pag, and the town of Novalja and the beach at Zrće on it, run all-hours clubs and bars through the summer months and close them again. Lošinj records around 2,600 hours of sunshine a year, an average summer air temperature of 24 °C and 7 °C in winter, with humidity around 70%.

How a visitor reaches the islands

Croatia counts 1,246 islands, islets and rocks, a figure that includes everything down to what appears only at low tide, and 47 of them are permanently inhabited, with Krk and Korčula the most populated. Cres and Krk each cover 405.78 square kilometres. Brač rises to 780 metres. The arithmetic of the coastline is covered in Croatia: geography; what matters to a visit is that a large part of the shore is reachable only by boat.

The busiest passenger ports are Split and Zadar, and a scatter of small harbours runs the island services and the lines to Italian cities. Where a bridge has been built the pattern changes fast: the 2.4-kilometre Pelješac Bridge, begun in July 2018 and opened in July 2022 with 357 million euros of European Union funding, joined the two halves of Dubrovnik-Neretva County and cut more than 32 kilometres off the road to the Pelješac peninsula and to Korčula and Lastovo.

Some island groups are protected ground with almost nobody living on them. The Kornati archipelago is hundreds of mostly uninhabited islands administered from Murter, which reaches the mainland over a drawbridge; Kornat itself is 25.2 kilometres long and never more than 2.5 kilometres wide and makes up two-thirds of the park's land. Mljet covers 98.01 square kilometres and more than 72% of it is forest.

Overland, the motorway network reached 1,313.8 kilometres by December 2020, with the A1 from Zagreb to Split carrying the heaviest traffic and the A3 crossing the north from west to east into Slavonia. The railways run to 2,604 kilometres, of which 984 are electrified and 254 double track, which is why reaching the coast is generally a matter of driving. Airports serve Dubrovnik, Osijek, Pula, Rijeka, Split, Zadar and Zagreb, and Croatian airports handled more than 14 million passengers in 2025.

Where the visitor pressure concentrates

Two towns shared the top of the 2025 accommodation figures at 4.2 million nights each, Rovinj on the Istrian coast and Dubrovnik at the southern tip. Poreč followed with 3.3 million, Split with 3.2 million and Zagreb with 2.7 million. By county, Istria took 28.3 million nights, Split-Dalmatia 18.4 million from 3.9 million arrivals, and Primorje-Gorski Kotar 15.5 million from 3.2 million arrivals. Away from the sea the numbers fall off a cliff: Zagreb's 2.7 million, then Pannonian Croatia with 1.4 million and North Croatia with 1.3 million, the latter growing 4.1% over 2024, the fastest movement of any region that year.

Dubrovnik is where the concentration has been measured and acted on. The city took 36 overnight visitors per resident over 2023, and in 2019 it received almost 1.5 million overnight visitors against a resident population of 41,000. Cruise traffic added 742,000 passengers from 538 ships in 2017. The Zagreb Institute of Economics has attributed around 60,000 visitors a year to the television series filmed in the old city.

UNESCO warned in 2016 that the World Heritage status of the old city was at risk unless the numbers came down. From 2018 the city staggered cruise arrivals, allowed two ships in dock at any one time and capped cruise passengers entering the historic core at 4,000 a day, which is half the figure UNESCO had recommended. In the same round it removed 80% of the souvenir stands and cut outdoor restaurant seating by 20%. The walls run two kilometres around the city and are four to six metres thick on the landward side.

What the inland regions hold

Zagreb holds around thirty museum and gallery collections containing more than 3.6 million exhibits, excluding church and private holdings. The Archaeological Museum accounts for nearly 400,000 objects. The Croatian Natural History Museum holds more than 250,000 specimens, among them the Neanderthal remains, stone weapons and tools from the single site at Krapina. There are about twenty permanent or seasonal theatres and stages; the Croatian National Theatre building opened in 1895 and the Vatroslav Lisinski concert hall was completed in 1973. Animafest, the animated film festival, runs in even-numbered years and the Music Biennale in odd-numbered ones, and the city marks its own day on 16 November.

North of the capital, Zagorje and Međimurje keep the castles and the spa water. Trakošćan sits on a hill and dates from the thirteenth century. Varaždin has a fortified old town originating in the fourteenth century and a cathedral built in 1647. Čakovec Castle houses the Međimurje county museum and a gallery, and the Baroque frescoes of Ivan Ranger, painted between 1776 and 1786, are at Šenkovec and Štrigova. Mineral springs come up at Vučkovec and around Sveti Martin na Muri. Marija Bistrica draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims a year to a church that has stood since the fourteenth century, holding a Black Madonna with Child that was hidden during the Ottoman invasion of the sixteenth century and lost for decades afterwards.

Slavonia and Baranja in the east are the part of the country that visitor statistics barely register. Osijek has a Baroque core; Đakovo has its cathedral; the Kopački Rit wetland in Baranja carries about 260 recorded bird species, among them white and black storks, great white egrets and white-tailed eagles. Three annual folklore events, Đakovački vezovi, Vinkovačke jeseni and Brodsko kolo, bring out costume, dancing, singing and processions of horses and wedding wagons. Vukovar sits on the Danube, and Ilok stands close to the country's easternmost point.

What the heritage listings actually cover

Ten Croatian properties are on the World Heritage List, eight cultural and two natural, with fifteen more on the tentative list. The two earliest, both inscribed in 1979, are the historical complex of Split with the Palace of Diocletian and the old city of Dubrovnik, which was re-examined in 1994. The Euphrasian Basilica complex in Poreč and the historic city of Trogir followed in 1997, the Cathedral of St James in Šibenik in 2000, Stari Grad Plain on Hvar in 2008, the Stećci medieval tombstone graveyards in 2016 and the Venetian works of defence in 2017. The natural pair are Plitvice Lakes, listed in 1979 and extended in 2000, and the ancient and primeval beech forests, added in stages from 2007. Three of the ten are components of larger properties whose titles reach past the country: the beech forests are listed as those of the Carpathians and other regions of Europe, the Venetian works cover the Stato da Terra and the western Stato da Mar, and the stećci graveyards are listed as a single group of medieval cemeteries.

The listings are not the whole map. Croatia has designated eight national parks, of which Plitvice is the oldest, and there are 116 Blue Flag beaches. Krka has travertine waterfalls and two monasteries, the Franciscan house on the island of Visovac founded in 1445 and the Serbian Orthodox monastery of Krka founded in 1345. Paklenica carries 150 to 200 kilometres of marked trails and paths through a karst canyon. The Roman amphitheatre at Pula still holds festivals and events, and 18 kilometres from Knin the Roman town of Burnum has the ruins of an amphitheatre built in 77 AD for 8,000 people. Brijuni, the island group off the Istrian coast, was the summer residence of the Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito before it became a national park.

What the country puts on the intangible heritage lists is a separate register and a different way into the same places, and it is covered in Croatia: culture.