Lovran Went Straight Up, Zagreb Slowed Down, Plitvice Didn’t Care I Was There 🇭🇷

Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Journal 2

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From sea level in Lovran to 1,396 metres. From a mountain summit to a city market in Zagreb. From a capital to Plitvice lakes that build their own world.

Lovran

I started the week looking up. Vojak — the highest peak of Učka — was right there above Lovran, where the Adriatic meets the mountain without any polite transition. One moment I was walking along a coastal promenade lined with century-old villas, the next I was climbing through beech forest so thick the sea disappeared entirely.

The trail from Lovran doesn’t forgive shortcuts. It gains over 1,300 metres of elevation and takes its time doing it. The lower slopes smell like chestnut and damp earth. Higher up, the forest thins and the wind finds you before the summit does. I climbed for hours in a kind of focused silence — one foot, then the next, the only rhythm that actually works on a mountain.

When I reached the stone observation tower at the top, the Adriatic opened up on one side and the continental interior stretched flat on the other. Two completely different countries visible from the same pair of feet. Kvarner islands scattered below like someone had dropped them. The Italian coast faintly visible on the horizon. I stood there understanding something that a map can’t communicate — Croatia is where the Mediterranean and Central Europe physically collide, and Vojak is the exact point of impact.

Zagreb

Zagreb was a different kind of altitude. I walked onto Ilica and the city hit me in a straight line — the longest street in Zagreb, stretching from the main square westward like a spine holding everything together. Trams rattled past buildings that mix Austro-Hungarian facades with ground-floor cafés where people sit for hours over a single coffee. Zagreb doesn’t rush. It lingers.

Dolac market sits just above the main square, open-air, loud, and completely without pretence. Farmers sell what they grew that morning. I picked up tomatoes that smelled like actual soil, cheese wrapped in cloth, and honey from a man who talked about his bees the way some people talk about their children. Everything at Dolac has a face behind it. No barcodes. No middlemen. Just a handshake and a plastic bag.

I took it all to Zrinjevac — the first park in Zagreb’s Green Horseshoe, the chain of squares and gardens laid out in the 1870s that gives the lower town its breathing room. Plane trees line the walkways. A music pavilion sits in the centre like it’s still waiting for the next performance. I sat on a bench, ate what I’d bought at Dolac, and watched the city do what it does best — exist without performing.

Then I went south, and the world changed again.

Plitvice

Plitvice Lakes don’t look real, and I mean that literally. Sixteen lakes connected by waterfalls, stacked in terraces through a forested valley, the water shifting between emerald, turquoise, and a blue that doesn’t have a name. The colour comes from minerals and organisms and the angle of light — it changes every hour, and no photograph captures what your eyes actually see.

I walked the wooden boardwalks that float just above the water’s surface. Below my feet, travertine barriers were still forming — the lakes are alive in a geological sense, the calcium carbonate in the water constantly depositing, building new dams, redirecting waterfalls. Plitvice is not scenery. It’s a system that has been constructing itself for thousands of years and hasn’t finished.

I stood at Veliki Slap — the largest waterfall, nearly 80 metres of freefall — and felt the mist before I heard the sound. The force of it settles into your chest. You don’t admire Plitvice. You submit to it.

A mountain that splits two worlds. A city that feeds itself from its own hands. A lake system that builds itself while you watch.

Croatia doesn’t show off. It just keeps revealing.

Next week — the coast calls again. But the interior earned its place first.

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