Zadar. Things to do, map and hidden gems

The church of St Simeon keeps Zadar's most precious object: the silver sarcophagus of the city's protector, a chest of two hundred and fifty kilograms of silver forged between 1377 and 1380 by Francis of Milan with thirteen Zadar masters, commissioned by queen Elizabeth, wife of Louis of Anjou. The chest is a masterpiece of medieval goldsmithing and at the same time a comic strip in metal: its reliefs tell how the saint's body reached Zadar, how the queen tried to take a piece of it and how she repented, with portraits of the commissioner and her three daughters. The sarcophagus floats above the high altar, carried by two bronze angels cast from Turkish cannons, and inside truly lies the body of St Simeon the God-receiver, the old man who by the Gospel held the infant Christ in his arms. The church itself is a 17th-century Baroque room on older foundations, calm and slightly dark, which only sharpens the silver's glow. It is most festive around 8 October, the saint's day, when the chest is opened and the town celebrates its Šime; the rest of the year you have the reliefs almost to yourself. Entry is free, shoulders covered.

Stomorica is Zadar's smallest monument and one of its most unusual: the foundations of a pre-Romanesque chapel of the 11th century, uncovered in the 1960s below the level of today's street in the Varoš quarter. The chapel of St Ursula, which the people fondly called Stomorica, had a plan counted on one hand's fingers in Europe: a six-leaf, six semicircular apses around a central space, like a stone rosette laid on the ground. Such six-leaf chapels are a speciality of early medieval Dalmatia and tied to the era of Croatian rulers; Zadar's is among the most legible, because from the excavation's rim the whole shape is seen at once, like a drawing at one-to-one scale. Around the foundations daily life flows, cafés, the street, residents with shopping bags, and precisely that contrast makes the place striking: a thousand years of difference in two metres of height. Stand at the railing, read the plaque and look at the six arcs in the stone; it takes three minutes, and you carry away one of the city's oldest images. Then continue through Varoš, the liveliest old quarter, toward People's Square.

The Oštri rat lighthouse at Puntamika has guarded the entrance to Zadar's harbour since 1871: a white stone tower seventeen metres tall with the keeper's house beside it, among the oldest on the Croatian coast still doing their job. Its light still leads ships through the Zadar channel, and to walkers it serves as the goal of the city's loveliest shore walk: the path from the centre via Borik leads straight to the cape, where beside the tower the view opens over the whole channel, from Ugljan to the silhouettes of the Velebit. Around the lighthouse spreads an old-school bathing place, stone slabs and shingle coves, so sightseeing joins swimming naturally; the tower is not visited inside, but its foot is public and always open. Oštri rat is also the unofficial stage of the Zadar sunset: the sun drops exactly before the lighthouse, the boats return to harbour, and the light at the tower's top takes over the shift. Come half an hour before sunset with a towel and something cold: you get the same show as on the riva, only with half the audience and a lighthouse in the frame.

St Donatus is Zadar in a single building: a huge pre-Romanesque rotunda from the early 9th century, raised on the slabs of the Roman forum, with two columns of the imperial square built straight into its foundations. The circular body, twenty-seven metres tall, with an upper gallery and three apses, has no true model anywhere on the Adriatic; it was built when Zadar was Byzantine and bishop Donatus, after whom the church is named, travelled as a diplomat between Constantinople and Charlemagne. The interior is bare to the stone, and precisely that emptiness makes the impression: the eye climbs the rough walls toward the window light, while through grilles underfoot the Roman foundations show. The church has long served music rather than mass: its acoustics, with a four-second echo, carry the Musical Evenings in St Donatus, a festival that has filled the rotunda with Renaissance and Baroque every summer since 1961. Pair the visit with the climb up the nearby belfry of St Anastasia: from above you see best how the round church sits on the rectangular forum, millennium upon millennium.

Zadar's forum is the largest Roman square on the Croatian side of the Adriatic: ninety by forty-five metres of civic centre laid out in the 1st century BC under the emperor Augustus, as the preserved inscription of proconsul Tamphilus proudly reports. Two thousand years later the forum is an open book in the middle of town: you walk on the original slabs, sit among scattered capitals and columns, and history here has neither fence nor ticket. Of the Capitoline temple complex remain the foundations and one complete column, fourteen metres tall, which in the Middle Ages served as the pillar of shame, its chains still in the stone. The square's edge is held by St Donatus and the archbishop's palace, and toward evening the forum becomes the town's living room: children chase a ball among the spolia, elders sit on column drums warm from the sun, street musicians claim a corner. Walk the forum twice, by day for the details and inscriptions, by night for the lighting that returns monumentality to the stone; and if you wonder what was dug up, the finds are across the way in the Archaeological Museum.

The cathedral of St Anastasia is the largest church in Dalmatia and Romanesque at its ripest: a three-nave basilica of the 12th and 13th centuries whose front carries three portals, blind arcades and two stone rose windows, a larger Romanesque and a smaller Gothic one, stacked like two ages in one wall. It was built on early Christian foundations, suffered when the crusaders sacked Zadar in 1202, and was completed precisely out of that rebuilding. Inside are marble altars, 15th-century choir stalls and, in the apse, the sarcophagus of St Anastasia, a martyr of Sirmium whose relics reached Zadar from Constantinople in the early 9th century. The belfry was begun in 1452 and finished only in 1893 to a design by the English architect Thomas Jackson; its hundred and eighty steps lead to the old town's best panorama: the peninsula's roofs, the forum underfoot, the islands offshore. The climb is charged separately from the church and is worth every cent, especially late afternoon, when the light settles on the stone. Sightseeing pauses during mass; the schedule hangs on the door.

The Sea Organ at the end of Zadar's waterfront is the city's most celebrated modern monument: seventy metres of white stone steps beneath which architect Nikola Bašić hid thirty-five organ pipes in 2005, into which wave and tide press air. The sea thus plays itself, without electricity or schedule: long, deep chords that never repeat, stronger in a southerly, barely audible in a calm. The idea was born from the rebuilding of a waterfront ruined in the war and won the European Prize for Urban Public Space in 2006, and today Zadar is hard to imagine without the image of people sitting on the steps, silent, listening. Best come toward evening: the sun drops into the sea directly before the organ, ships pass toward the harbour, and the sound changes with every wave of their wake. The steps double as a bathing spot, in summer people dive from them into clean, deep water. Come twice, on a calm day and a windy one: they are two different concerts, and therein lies the genius of this place, which never plays the same piece.

Paklenica National Park is the biggest outing from Zadar: some forty minutes' drive toward Starigrad, and from the coastal road you turn straight into the heart of the Velebit, where two canyons, Velika and Mala Paklenica, cut Croatia's highest mountain down to the sea. The park has existed since 1949 and offers a range that in Europe rarely fits into one morning: a walk along the canyon floor beneath cliffs up to four hundred metres tall, beech woods and mountain meadows higher up, and Manita peć, the park's only show cave. Paklenica is also a climbing mecca with over four hundred routes, so carabiners chirp constantly along the trail; schools of climbing by the entrance serve beginners. For a first visit the classic suffices: the path from the entrance to the mountain hut and back, three to four hours' walk along the stream and the mills, with a pause for curd cheese at the hut. Bring water and firm shoes, start early in summer for the lower canyon bakes in the sun; tickets are at the gate or online. Whoever came to Zadar only for the sea understands in Paklenica why this region is called the most concentrated piece of Croatia.

Sveto brdo, the Holy Mountain, is the southern giant of the Velebit: a regular pyramid of one thousand seven hundred and fifty-three metres visible from half of Dalmatia, Zadar included, and from which half of Dalmatia is visible back. The summit was a sacred mountain from ancient times, by tradition the seat of a pagan shrine later replaced by a cross, and today it is the goal of the most serious mountain tour in Zadar's surroundings: the ascent from Paklenica via the hut and Vlaški grad demands a full day, fifteen hundred metres of climb and a sure foot, for the summit ridge can be exposed to wind. The reward is a view Croatia rarely grants from one spot: the whole central Adriatic with islands from Pag to the Kornati, Ravni kotari as a green carpet, and behind one's back Lika and Bosnia to the horizon. On the top stand a great cross and the box with the summit book; in summer carry three litres of water per person, for there is no spring above the hut. The less prepared should take Sveto brdo with their eyes, from the riva or the beach: it is that spike which the evening sun paints pink last, when all Zadar already lies in shadow. That too, in its own way, is meeting it.

The Gold and Silver of Zadar is the permanent exhibition in the Benedictine convent beside St Mary's and the most precious room in Croatia: reliquaries, crosses, chests and monstrances from the 8th to the 18th century, which the nuns guarded for centuries through sieges, fires and bombardments without surrendering a single piece. The display was created in 1951 at the urging of the writer Miroslav Krleža, who first exhibited Zadar's treasures in Zagreb and returned them to the city with the idea that they stay together, under the roof of the women who had saved them. Today a thousand years of goldsmithing line up through several halls: Byzantine plaques, Romanesque reliquaries shaped as hands and heads, Gothic caskets, Renaissance crosses, all in a half-dark that turns metal into ember. The high point is the reliquary of St James and the textile collection, and the most touching are the small objects, rings and earrings of Zadar's townswomen. The exhibition is still run by the Benedictines, so a visit has the tone of a call, not a museum: quiet, respectful, no flash. An hour covers the whole; the ticket is bought at the convent door.

The Greeting to the Sun is the luminous sibling of the Sea Organ, the second half of Bašić's diptych on the peninsula's tip: a circle twenty-two metres across, paved with three hundred glass plates beneath which photovoltaic cells gather the sun by day and return it by night as a playful light show under the walkers' feet. The installation is a homage to the Zadar sunset, the one Alfred Hitchcock declared from his hotel window in 1964 the most beautiful in the world, and it is conceived as the place where the city literally sees the sun off and welcomes it back. Around the great circle smaller ones are laid out, planets to scale, so a walk on the cape is also a small school of the solar system. The crowd peaks at dusk, when half the waterfront settles on the stone around the circle: first everyone looks seaward at the sun sinking behind the islands, and the moment darkness falls they turn to the lights underfoot, children run across them, photographers hunt reflections. Come half an hour before sunset, claim the rim facing the open sea and stay for the first colours out of the glass: few squares in Europe change mood so suddenly and so cheerfully.

The Museum of Ancient Glass holds one of the largest collections of Roman glass outside Italy: some five thousand objects excavated mostly from the necropolises of Zadar and Ravni kotari, where flasks, jugs and urns lay protected in graves for two thousand years. The display in the Cosmacendi palace, opened in 2009, is arranged as a journey through Roman daily life: glass for table and pantry, for bath and cosmetics, tear bottles from funeral rites and mould-blown masterpieces thin as a breath. It is fascinating how modern the forms are, some cups look as if they left a shop this morning, yet they are two millennia old. The liveliest part of the museum is the workshop in the attic: several times a day glassblowers, commentary included, turn a molten drop into a jug or pendant, and the resulting pieces are sold in the museum shop as Zadar's smartest souvenir. An hour to ninety minutes is enough, the air-conditioning makes the museum ideal for midday heat, and the palace terrace looks straight onto the harbour and the walls. With small children aim for a blowing slot; the schedule stands at the entrance.

City Galleria is Zadar's in-town shopping centre, in Relja, some ten minutes' walk from the footbridge toward the peninsula: several floors of shops around a bright atrium, with fashion brands, a bookshop, a drugstore, a supermarket in the basement and cafés along the glass. In a city that lives outdoors in summer, the Galleria is an air-conditioned refuge: the place to spend an hour usefully during the worst midday heat or a sudden downpour, buying what got forgotten on the way. Its advantage over the bigger centre on the city's edge is the address: one comes here on foot from the old town, without car or parking, so the Galleria is the natural choice for guests staying on and around the peninsula. The offer covers the everyday, clothes, shoes, cosmetics, press and electronics in miniature, and the basement supermarket is among the best stocked in the centre, with long hours. Touristically speaking this is a service, not an attraction, but a service one appreciates when needed: air-conditioning, a cash machine, a pharmacy nearby and everything done in half an hour, then back toward the riva.

Zadar's market, for everyone simply the pijaca, works every morning along the old town's northern wall, on the stretch between People's Square and the Sea Gate: stalls of fruit, vegetables, cheese, prosciutto and flowers under canvas parasols, with the fish market in its own hall right beside. This is the exchange of flavours of Zadar's hinterland and islands: Pag cheese and curd, olive oil from Ugljan, tomatoes and chard from Ravni kotari, figs, the marasca cherries for which Zadar is famous, honey, rakija and homemade marasca juice. The fish hall is a chapter of its own, a morning performance in which sardines, gilthead and scorpionfish sell to loud banter and louder bargaining; whoever wants the best choice comes by nine. The pijaca is also the best school of the season: what is on the stalls is ripe, and that is what should be eaten tonight. Buy figs and cheese for the beach, take a coffee at the market's edge and watch the choreography of a town provisioning itself; half an hour of the pijaca will tell you more about Zadar than half a day of museums. Cash comes in handy, small stalls take cards reluctantly.