Wonders of Croatia | The Country Built on Waterfalls | Travel Documentary 4K

The water here does not run past the village, it runs through it, under the houses and over the garden walls. This is Rastok, a village built on its own waterfalls. And it is only one of the strange, beautiful places packed into one small country. The country is Croatia, and most of it faces the sea. A thin strip of land pressed against the Adriatic, with more than a thousand islands spilled out in front of it. Some hold a single stone village. Some hold nothing but sheep and old salt pans. One of those islands, near the end of this coast, still swears it gave the world The man who first told Europe what lay at the edge of the map. Keep that one in mind. We reach it late. There are lakes here that pour into one another down a wooden walkway. A gold beach that swings with the wind. A Roman arena in the north, and a whole walled city in the south you can circle on foot, above the roofs. People keep calling this the most beautiful coast in Europe. Over the next hour, we will follow it, north to south, and let you decide. The arena comes first. A Roman amphitheater in Pula, almost whole, its outer wall still ringing the town after 2,000 years. More than 20,000 people once filled the stone tiers. In summer, they fill again, for concerts under the open sky. Behind the arena, the old town climbs past more Rome. The Arch of the Sergii, one family's victory, cut into stone. The Temple of Augustus, rebuilt after a wartime bomb flattened it. Down at the harbour, the cranes of a working shipyard still swing over the water. Off that water sit the islands. 14 of them make up Bruggini. Once a private retreat, now a park where deer and peacocks cross the grass, and a safari herd of old diplomatic gifts grows old in the sun. Roman walls sink into the shallows offshore. It feels staged, and it is, but the water around it is real, and it runs clear all the way down the coast. That clear water laps right up to the houses in Rovinge. The town sits on what was once an island, tall pastel houses packed onto a rock with their feet in the sea. Lines of washing hang between the shutters. Fishing boats knock together in the harbour below. One tower rises above the roofs. St. Euphemia, built to copy the bell tower of St. Mark in Venice, because for 500 years Venice ran this coast. The lanes below are worn smooth and slippery. Walk up them, and the sea drops away behind you. The land behind Istria folds into low hills, and on one of them sits Motovun, a stone village ringed by its old walls. The forest under it hides something valuable. Truffles grow in the damp oak roots, hunted with dogs, and a good white one can cost more than the meal it flavours. From the walls, the next stretch of coast waits. That coast turns grand at Opatija. When this was Austria's empire, its emperors and their courts came here to take the sea air, and they built villas and hotels along the shore to match. The style stayed, white facades still line the front, grand hotels and painted balconies, a whole shore dressed for a season that never quite ended. A stone path called the Lungomare runs for miles along the water's edge, past coves and swimming ladders and old bathing houses. In autumn, the sea throws itself over the railings in white sheets. People walk it anyway, collars up. The town's flower is the camellia, and its scent hangs in the public gardens through the mild winters that first drew the sick and the rich. It is a soft place, easy, almost too polished. Out past the last villa, a bare island tells a rougher story. Kirk is that island, joined to the mainland by a long grey bridge. It is the biggest island in the country, and much of it is almost bare, wind-scraped stone where only sheep and sage hold on. Then the road drops to a bay and the water turns. In Kirk Town, a round francopane tower guards a knot of stone lanes and a small cathedral. At the island's far end, the pebble beach at Baska curls under bare mountains, the water clear enough to count the stones on the bottom. Kirk keeps an odd claim. Some of the oldest writing in the Croatian language was cut into stone here, in a spiky old alphabet called glagolitic that almost nobody can read now. The island wears its age quietly. The country's real weight of history sits inland, in a city most visitors skip. That city is Zagreb, the capital, set well back from the sea in the flat green north. Blue trams rattle across its squares. Most people racing for the coast drive straight past, and they miss the one part of the country that feels fully lived in rather than visited. The old core climbs a low hill. Up top, St. Mark's Church wears a roof tiled in bright coats of arms, and a cannon has fired at noon for over a hundred years, once to set the city's clocks. Below spread wide boulevards and cafe tables, and the newer town. Zagreb lives at street level, in markets and long coffees, and a lake on the edge of town where the city swims in summer. It is a working capital, not a stage set. But the country's strangest water is two hours south, where a whole river falls apart down a staircase of lakes. Plitvice is where it happens. Sixteen lakes step down a wooded valley, each one spilling into the next over rims of soft rock. The water is a color that looks wrong, teal in one pool, deep green in the next, so clear you watch trout hang over sunken trees. The rims are alive. They are built of travertine, a chalky crust that moss and bacteria lay down grain by grain, growing the barriers a little taller every year. Wooden walkways carry you right across the falls. Off the path, the forest is thick enough to hide brown bears. The same trick of falling water built a village downstream. At Rastok, the Karana river splits around old houses and drops through their gardens in dozens of small falls, turning wooden mill wheels that once ground the valley's grain. In winter, it freezes to glass. South of here, the mountains close in and go dry. The dry range is Velobit, a long wall of gray limestone standing between the inland and the sea. A gorge cuts straight into it at Paklenitsa, its sides rising hundreds of feet, so steep and close that climbers hang off them by the hundred on summer weekends. Walk in and the noise drops away. A stream runs over the stones, pale and cold. Higher up, the trees give out and the rock takes over, bare and cracked, home to eagles and the odd bear coming over from the forests behind. It is hard walking and a long way from anywhere. Climb to the range's shoulder and the whole coast opens below, the sea flat and bright, an island laid across it like a pale bone. That island is nothing like the green ones behind you. It has almost no soil at all. Pag looks like the moon. The cold Bora wind that pours off Velobit scours the island bare and salts it white, so half of it is pale rock and low gray sage with barely a tree in sight. A thin bridge ties its southern tip to the mainland. Yet things live off this hardness. Sheep graze the salted scrub and give a sharp, hard cheese the island is known for. Old salt pans still flood and dry along the shore, work the same slow way for centuries. In the stone town of Pag, women knot a fine lace by hand. It is a bare, honest place, more work than show. Beyond it, the coast softens again and the road bends toward an old city that greets the sunset with music. Not a bell, not a band. The sea itself plays it. Zadar keeps that music on its western tip. A set of pipes runs under the marble steps at the water's edge, and the waves push air through them, so the sea plays a slow, tuneless chord that never quite repeats. Beside it, a disc of solar cells glows after dark. Behind the music, the old town is packed onto a narrow finger of land ringed by Venetian walls. A round, ninth-century church stands on the bones of a Roman forum, its old columns reused in the walls. Sunset here draws a crowd, and it earns the crowd. Nearby, an older seat of power sits half-forgotten. That is Nin, on its own tiny island in a shallow lagoon, reached by a stone bridge. Croatia's first kings were crowned in this small place, and its church is so small a grown man fills the doorway. Salt still dries in pans around it. Past the lagoon, the sea is full of empty islands. The Kornati are those islands, around 140 of them, most with nobody living on them at all. From the air, they scatter across the blue like the broken pieces of a single ridge that the sea rose up and drowned. Almost nothing grows on them. This is a national park you visit by boat. Sailors thread the still channels between the and tie up in empty coves for the night. The outer sides drop into the sea as sheer stone cliffs, the crowns where the water below turns suddenly dark and deep. There is no fresh water out here, no shops, only stone, salt herbs, and a few huts where shepherds once summered. It is beautiful and a little severe, a place that gives nothing away. The mainland it broke from holds the opposite, a river so full of life it spills over in waterfalls. That river is the Krka, and where Plitvice fell in quiet steps, the Krka falls in a roar. At Skradinski Buk, the whole river drops over a wide bank of travertine in a curtain of white water loud enough to drown talk, throwing spray and rainbows into the trees. People lived off this power. Old stone mills line the banks, their wheels once turning day and night to grind grain and full cloth for the region. For years you could swim in the pool below the falls. Now you watch from the boardwalks, which is probably fairer to the river. Upstream the water widens and stills, and on a small green island in the middle sits a Franciscan monastery, white against the reeds, reached only by boat. Monks have kept it for 500 years. Where the river finally meets the sea, a cathedral stands built with no mortar at all. The cathedral is in Sibenik, and it is the strangest church on the coast. St. James was raised entirely from stone, slab lock to slab with no mortar and no brick anywhere in it, a thing the masons were told could not be done. It took over a hundred years. Run your eye along its outside and 71 carved faces look back, real townspeople from 500 years ago, some scowling, some laughing at whoever paid too little. Above the old town, a fort turned garden looks down over the roofs and the islands. This was a Croatian town, never a Venetian one. The same coast keeps making these towns. Primosten spills over a small round hill that was once an island, its houses tight around a church at the top. On the dry slopes behind it, farmers built low walls into a gray net across the hillside, holding little pockets of soil for vines. From the water, it looks like lace. The next town is nearly an island too. Trogir sits on a scrap of an island, so small you can walk across it in minutes, tied to the mainland and the next island by two short bridges. Two thousand years of building are crammed into it, stone on older stone, until the lanes feel like corridors. Its cathedral holds a doorway carved 800 years ago by a local master called Radovan, a crowd of saints, lions and ordinary people worked into the stone with a patience that is hard to picture now. A Venetian fortress squares off the town's seaward end. Trogir is a showpiece, and a small one, easy to see in the morning. Just across the water, the coast changes register. The next city is no museum piece. It is a living town, wrapped around the palace of a Roman emperor, still lived in 1700 years on. Split grew up inside a palace. When the Roman emperor Diocletian stepped down, he built himself a fortified home the size of a small town on this shore, and when Rome fell, people simply moved in. They never left. Today, the palace is the old town. Laundry hangs from imperial windows, bars fill the cellars, and children kick balls across the emperor's courtyard, the peristyle, ringed by columns shipped in from Egypt. His mausoleum became the cathedral, and the bell tower beside it climbs high over the roofs. Out front, a wide palm-lined promenade runs along the harbour, where the whole city drinks coffee and watches the ferries come in. Split is loud, sunburnt, and completely alive. Behind it, a river has cut a canyon so sheer that pirates once used it as a wall. Omas sits where the Satina River bursts out of the mountains into the sea, through a gorge with walls so high and close they throw the town into early shade. For hundreds of years, pirates lived here, slipping out to raid passing ships and ducking back into the canyon, where no navy could follow. Two ruined forts still cling to the rock above the roofs, reached by steep paths that leave your legs shaking. From the top, the view runs down to the river mouth and out to the islands. The pirates are long gone, and their canyon is now a playground. The Satina behind the town runs green and cold between cliffs, and people raft it, swim it, and slide down zip lines strung across it. At its source, far inland, the water rises in a round blue eye hundreds of feet deep. Back on the coast, the mountains and the beaches meet along one long shore. The Makaska Riviera is that shore, a long strip of white pebble beaches running for 40 miles under a wall of grey rock. The Bayokovo Mountains rise almost straight up behind the coast road, close enough that by afternoon, their shadow reaches the sea. Makaska town curves around a bay between two wooded points, its water so pale it turns turquoise over the stones. Behind it, a road switchbacks up Bayokovo to a skywalk hung out over a sheer drop, where on a clear day, you can see across the sea to Italy. The prettiest of these beaches is at Brella, where pines lean out over the water, and one small rock crowned with a single wind-bent tree sits just offshore. It has been photographed a million times and still holds up. South of the beaches, an island lies low on the water, a tongue of gold reaching off it. That island is Brac, built of a white stone so good the Romans cut it for Diocletian's palace and shipped it far beyond the coast. The bare top of the island, Vidova Gora, is the highest point on any Adriatic island, and the walk up is long and shadeless. Down at the water, quiet stone towns like Bol and Supetar sit among the pines and old olive groves. The pace is slow. But just west of Bol, the coast does something no other beach on this sea quite manages. A spit of fine, pale pebbles reaches straight out into the channel for a quarter mile, and its pointed tip shifts one way and then the other as the wind and current move it, so its shape is never the same two weeks running. Windsurfers love the funnel of wind that bends it. The next island keeps a stronger wind still, and more hours of sun than almost anywhere in Europe. Var counts its sunshine and sells it over 2,700 hours a year, and it once backed the claim so hard that hotels promised money back on snowy days. The heat bakes the hills into fields of lavender that turn the slopes purple and scent the whole island in June. Var town wraps a marble square around its harbour, watched over by a Spanish fort on the hill. By day, it is old and calm. At night, it fills with yachts and noise, the liveliest port on the coast. Just offshore lie a scatter of low, wooded islets. Near the old capital, a plain still carries the straight stone lines that Greek settlers laid out to divide their fields 2,400 years ago, farmed the same shape ever since. Var is polished and busy. The next island turned its back on all of that and stayed hard to reach. This is the farthest of the inhabited islands, and for 40 years, you could not come here at all. The army held it as a closed base, off-limits to outsiders, and that long lock kept the island plain while the others filled with visitors. So this still feels like an older coast. Two small fishing towns, terraced vineyards making a sharp local white, tunnels and gun posts hidden in the hills. Its coves are hard to reach, and the best of them, Stineva, hides behind a narrow gap in the cliffs you could sail straight past and miss. Off a nearby islet, a low sea cave floods with light near midday, the sun coming up through the water and filling the whole chamber with a hard blue glow. Boats slip in through a mouth barely tall enough to clear your head. The next island holds a bigger claim than a cave. It says it gave the world the man who mapped it. This is Corcula, and here is the payoff we promised at the start. The island swears that Marco Polo, whose book first told Europe of China and the far edges of Asia, was born inside these walls. Venice disputes it. Corcula does not care and shows you the house. The old town is a small masterpiece of planning. Its streets branch off one spine like the bones of a fish, one side angled to catch the cooling summer wind, the other bent to block the cold winter one. Venetian stone lions still guard the gates. On summer nights, men in armor fight a slow sword dance in the square, a story of two kings and a stolen woman clashing real blades in a ring. The hills behind grow grapes for two fine wines you can barely find off the island. Farther out, a green island hides two lakes with the sea inside them. Niet is that island, the greenest on the coast, half of it a national park under thick pine forest. At its heart lie two lakes joined to the open sea by one narrow channel, so their water is salt, rising and falling with the tide inland among the trees. In the larger lake sits an island, and on that island a stone monastery, Benedictine monks having chosen this quiet spot 800 years ago. You reach it by a small boat across still water. It is a lake inside an island, inside the sea. Old stories cling to Mliet. Some say this was the island where the nymph Calypso held Odysseus for seven years, and looking at it you understand why he was slow to leave. The coast has one thing left to show, and it saved the greatest for last, a whole city walled against the sea. Dubrovnik is that city, and it is the finish for a reason. A ring of stone walls, a mile and a quarter around and up to 80 feet high, wraps a whole town of marble streets and terracotta roofs, and you can walk the full circuit along the top. For centuries this was its own small republic, a trading city that stayed free by being clever, paying off empires and sending its ships everywhere. Its main street, the Stradun, is worn to a shine by 500 years of feet. Damage from the shells of a war within living memory has been carefully repaired. Ride the cable car up the hill behind it at dusk, and the whole city sits below in the last gold light, ringed by walls, ringed by sea. A small wooded island floats just offshore. This is where the coast ends, and where the question we started with finally sits in front of you, waiting for an answer. We started in a village where the river runs under the houses. We end above a whole city ringed by stone walls, with the Adriatic going gold below and a thousand islands somewhere out in the haze. You saw the waterfalls and the pirate canyon, the gold beach, the island with a lake inside it. Whether that adds up to the most beautiful coast in Europe is yours to call now. Croatia does not seem worried either way. If the trip was worth your time, leave a like and subscribe so the next one finds you. Click on the video that is appearing now to keep discovering the wonder of the world.