Split-Dalmatia County

Around 305 AD, the Roman Emperor Diocletian built his retirement palace on the Dalmatian coast near his birthplace of Salona. Seventeen centuries later, 3,000 people still live inside that palace—the walls, cellars, and temples now forming half of Split's old town. This is the defining fact about Split-Dalmatia County: ancient infrastructure repurposed across millennia, continuously inhabited because the location remains optimal.

Split itself, Croatia's second-largest city at 180,000 residents, functions as capital of Dalmatia in practice if not in name. The city hosts the main ferry terminal connecting the mainland to the archipelago of Hvar, Brač, Vis, and Šolta—islands that draw tourists numbering in the millions. The county recorded 20.7 million overnight stays in 2024, the highest of any Croatian region, a 2.8% increase over the previous year. Tourism doesn't just dominate the economy; tourism has become the economy.

The county's geography explains both opportunity and limitation. A narrow coastal strip, densely populated, separates the Adriatic from a karst hinterland (Dalmatinska Zagora) that rises toward the Dinaric Alps and the Bosnian border. Mountains like Biokovo, Mosor, and Kozjak create microclimate divisions: Mediterranean warmth on the coast, continental cold in the interior. The interior has depopulated steadily; the coast urbanizes rapidly.

By 2026, Split-Dalmatia embodies Croatian coastal success: UNESCO sites, ferry connections, island destinations, a functioning regional capital. But the pattern also raises questions that Diocletian couldn't have anticipated—whether an economy can sustain itself on summer visitors, whether infrastructure built for emperors can handle mass tourism, whether the zagora interior will become uninhabited buffer between prosperous coast and another country's mountains.