Croatia has been the fastest-growing holiday destination for the last decade. Even so, to its credit, Croatia has still managed to avoid a thorough going-over by the tourist industry and therefore has retained its unique character, with a choice of unspoiled Mediterranean islands, edgy urban culture, Game of Thrones location tours and the lovely clear waters of the Adriatic.

Then there’s the excellent cuisine. Natural ingredients has become the watchword of Croatian food, with locally sourced ingredients, wines and olive oils standing up increasingly well to globalisation. Croatia has a growing reputation for niche festivals – not just the beach party kind but also in the rising number of arts festivals and small-town cultural affairs. In Zagreb and elsewhere, a host of new galleries and art attractions has given the country a cool and contemporary feel.

Croatia is blessed with a wealth of natural riches, boasting almost 2000 km of rocky, jagged shoreline and more than a thousand islands, many blanketed in luxuriant vegetation. Even during the heavily visited months of July and August there are still enough off-the-beaten-track islands, quiet coves and stone-built fishing villages to make you feel as if you’re visiting Europe at its most unspoiled. If urbane glamour’s your thing, you can enjoy swanky hotels, yacht-filled harbours and cocktail bars aplenty – especially in à-la-mode destinations such as Dubrovnik and Hvar. Wherever you go though you’ll find that Croatia retains an appeal for independent travellers that’s hard to find in the more package-orientated destinations elsewhere in the Mediterranean. Most budget and mid-range accommodation is still in the form of private apartments, and there has been an explosion in the number of backpacker-friendly hostel-type establishments in the major cities. When it comes to seaside-hugging campsites, Croatia is at the top of the league.

Since the early 1990s, when within about five years it experienced the collapse of communism, a war of national survival and the securing of independence, Croatia has come a long way. Nearly twenty-five years on, visitors will find Croatia to be a proudly independent nation, with a multicultural feel, where the more sober Central European values of discipline and hard work blend with the spontaneity, vivacity and taste for the good things in life that characterise the countries of southern Europe. The country also stands on one of the great fault lines of European civilisation, where European Catholicism meets Islam and the Orthodox Christianity of the East. Although Croats traditionally see themselves as a western people, distinct from the other South Slavs who made up the former Yugoslavia, many of the hallmarks of Balkan culture – the patriarchal families, the hospitality towards strangers and a fondness for grilled food – are as common in Croatia as in any other part of south-eastern Europe, suggesting that the country’s relationship with its neighbours is closer than many Croats may admit.

Title Image Credit: Miroslav Vajdic (Image Cropped)