Croatia

A medieval maritime city enclosed by stone walls from the 13th to 16th centuries, seat of the Republic of Ragusa, with marble streets, baroque churches and Renaissance fountains inside a 1,940-metre-long fortification circuit listed as UNESCO World Heritage in 1979.

A Byzantine-era cathedral complex in Poreč built by Bishop Euphrasius in the 6th century, with one of the finest complete Byzantine mosaic programmes surviving in the world, a 70-metre marble mosaic-adorned nave, and a 9th-century bell tower that forms the centrepiece of the historic peninsula of Poreč.

A Venetian-era Dalmatian port town on the island of Hvar, dominated by the 16th-century fortress above the harbour, with a car-free Renaissance piazza, the Hvar Theatre (one of the oldest in Europe, 1610), and a landscape of lavender fields and limestone uplands visible from the town.

Sixteen terraced lakes connected by waterfalls and formed by the deposition of travertine calcium carbonate over millennia, set in a forested karst canyon; UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979 and Croatia's oldest and most-visited national park.

A Roman amphitheatre built during the reign of Vespasian at the end of the first century CE, one of the largest and best-preserved Roman arenas surviving from antiquity, now hosting summer opera and film festivals and located on the waterfront of Pula, Istria.

Croatia's principal Gothic cathedral, originally built in the 13th century and rebuilt in the neo-Gothic style after the 1880 earthquake, with twin spires reaching 105 metres that dominate the Zagreb skyline, at the heart of the historic Gradec plateau above the modern city.