Split: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

Now in Split--:--:--

--°

Diocletian built this as his retirement palace between 295 and 305, a walled rectangle of about thirty thousand square metres with his apartments on the sea side and barracks on the land side. It was never abandoned: when Salona fell to the Avars around 639 its refugees moved into the empty palace and simply stayed, dividing the halls into houses. Three thousand people still live inside the walls, which makes it the only Roman palace in the world you cannot visit, because it is somebody’s street. Two hours, and there is no ticket for most of it.

Live camera

A short history of Split

Around AD 295 the Roman Emperor Diocletian began building a palace here, where he spent his last years after giving up power in 305. In the 7th century, when the nearby Roman city of Salona was destroyed, its inhabitants fled within the palace walls and settled inside them. This is how the city was born, and to this day people live, run shops and cook within walls built 1,700 years ago. The emperor's mausoleum became one of the oldest cathedrals in the world still in use. Venice ruled Split from 1420 to 1797. In 1979 the palace was declared a World Heritage Site.

The ten best sights in Split

1
Diocletian’s Palace
Free, you walk straight into it, and 3,000 people live inside
2
Peristyle
Free, the emperor’s courtyard, and the sphinx is Egyptian
3
Cathedral of St Domnius
7 euros with the tower, and it was Diocletian’s own tomb
4
Jupiter’s Temple
3 euros, a Roman temple turned baptistery, and tiny
5
Vestibule
Free, a domed room with the roof open, and singers use it
6
Palace Cellars
7 euros, and the imperial apartments above are gone but these are their plan
7
Golden Gate
Free, the emperor’s own entrance, and it faced Salona
8
Silver Gate
Free, the east gate, and the market is right outside it
9
Iron Gate
Free, and the clock above it still has twenty-four hours on the face
10
Bronze Gate
Free, the sea gate, and ships used to tie up at it

sleepntripFree with every roomThree audio walks in every city

A guide in your headphones, stop after stop.

To the walks

What is an audio walk?

Tours in Split →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Split:

Free walking tours in Split

A city living inside one man’s house

Golden Gate · The emperor’s own entrance, on the north side, because it faced Salona — the city he came from and where he had ruled. It has a double gate with a courtyard between them that could be sealed at both ends, so anyone who got through the first door found himself in a stone box with soldiers above him.
Grgur Ninski · Meštrović made him in 1929 and he stood on the Peristyle until the Italian occupation moved him out in 1941. He was a tenth-century bishop who fought Rome for the right to hold mass in the Croatian language rather than Latin — and he lost. Everyone rubs the big toe, which is the only polished part of four metres of bronze.
Peristyle · This courtyard was where subjects waited to be received, and they knelt as the emperor appeared at the far end. The sphinx on the right is genuinely Egyptian and about three and a half thousand years old — Diocletian shipped twelve of them from Egypt to decorate the palace, and three survive in the city.
Cathedral of St Domnius · This was Diocletian’s mausoleum, and it is now a church dedicated to Domnius — the bishop of Salona whom Diocletian had beheaded in 304 during the persecution he ordered. The emperor’s body was removed at some point nobody recorded, and the man he executed is now the saint of the building that was built to hold him.
Vestibule · A round domed room that was the last space before the imperial apartments, and the dome was once covered in mosaic. The roof has been open to the sky for centuries and the acoustics inside are extraordinary — a male choir called a klapa sings in it most days, with no amplification and no stage.
Palace Cellars · The emperor’s apartments above were pulled apart and built over long ago, but the substructures that carried them survive almost complete — and because they repeat the plan of the floor above, walking the cellars is the only way to see the shape of the rooms Diocletian actually lived in. They were full of rubbish until the 1950s.

The hill, the sea and the ball game

Split lives outdoors in a way few European cities do: the Riva at seven in the evening is the whole population walking in both directions, the pine hill above the town is public and free and has been protected since 1964, and on the sand at Bačvice they play a game that was invented here and is played nowhere else. This walk is the city rather than the ruin. Three hours, and it ends in the water.

Riva · The south wall of the palace once stood straight in the sea and ships tied up at the Bronze Gate; everything you are walking on was reclaimed, and the promenade as it looks now was laid out under French rule around 1807. The evening walk up and down it has a name — the korzo — and it is the same crowd every night.
Matejuška · The fishermen’s harbour at the end of the Riva, still working, with wooden boats that belong to families rather than companies. The concrete breakwater beside it is where half of Split sits with a bottle at sunset — there is no bar, no music and nobody sells anything, and it is the best place in town at eight in the evening.
Varoš · The fishermen’s and farmers’ quarter that grew up outside the palace walls from the seventeenth century, built as single-storey stone houses on lanes too narrow for a cart. It was the poor half of Split for three hundred years and almost nothing was knocked down, which is why it looks the way it does.
Marjan · The pines were planted by the citizens themselves from 1852 onwards — the hill was bare rock and a society was formed to forest it, with schoolchildren carrying soil up in baskets. It was made a protected park-forest in 1964, and there are hermit chapels cut into the cliffs on the south side from the fifteenth century.
Sustipan · A headland of pines with a small neoclassical rotunda on it, and it was the city cemetery from 1826 until 1958 — then the graves were moved and the park opened. Some of the old stones are still set into the low walls, and from the edge you see the whole harbour and the island of Šolta behind it.
Bačvice Beach · The water stays ankle deep for a hundred metres, which is why picigin was invented here: students coming home from Prague in 1908 started keeping a small ball off the water with their palms, and the rules are that there are none and the ball must never stop. It is played on the first of January every year.

What the palace was built from

Diocletian did not build in a desert. Twenty minutes inland was Salona, the capital of Roman Dalmatia and a city of perhaps sixty thousand people, and he was born within sight of it. Above that is the pass that every army coming to this coast has had to take, with a fortress on it. The palace was the retirement of a man who never went far from home, and the stone in it was cut on the island you can see from the Riva. Half a day, and a car or the bus to Solin.

Archaeological Museum · Founded in 1820, the oldest museum in Croatia, and almost everything in it came out of Salona. The courtyard is lined with stone sarcophagi stacked against the walls like furniture, because there are more of them than any building could display — Salona was Christian early and buried its dead in stone by the thousand.
Salona · The capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia, with an amphitheatre for eighteen thousand, and it was finished off by the Avars and Slavs around 639 — the survivors walked twenty minutes down the hill and moved into the empty palace, which is how Split began. The amphitheatre was pulled down by the Venetians in 1657 so the Ottomans could not use it.
Klis Fortress · It sits on the only gap in the mountain wall behind Split, which means whoever holds it controls the road from the interior to the coast. Petar Kružić held it against the Ottomans for twenty-five years with a band of irregulars and died in 1537 when it finally fell — the Ottomans sent his head into the fortress to end the resistance.
Meštrović Gallery · Ivan Meštrović built this as his own house and studio between 1931 and 1939, with the rooms laid out for the sculptures he intended to put in them. He left Croatia during the war, settled in America, and in 1952 gave the house, the land and everything in it to the state he had just left.
Kaštelet · A small fortified house from the sixteenth century that Meštrović bought to hold one work: twenty-eight walnut panels carving the life of Christ, which he worked on for most of forty years. They are in a chapel he built for them, in low light, and there is nothing else in the room.
Trogir · The whole old town is on a small island between the mainland and another island, reached by two bridges, and it has been a town continuously since the Greeks founded it in the third century BC. The west door of the cathedral was carved by a master called Radovan in 1240 and signed — which almost no medieval sculptor did.

sleepntripRoad and rail routesEvery night on the road, our hotel

Whole routes, with a room up to $80 at every stop.

To the routes

Getting to Split and getting around

Split Airport · At Kaštela, 25 kilometres out, and the shuttle to the port is 8 euros
Railway Station · On the waterfront, and the night train to Zagreb takes six hours
Bus Station · Beside the ferries, and buses to Dubrovnik, Zadar and Mostar
Ferry Port · The busiest in Croatia, and every island leaves from here

Cheap eats in Split

Eight counters where Split eats standing. The local thing is not seafood, it is soparnik — a flat pie of chard and onion between two sheets of thin dough, baked under embers on the hearth, cut in diamonds and brushed with garlic oil. It comes from the Poljica valley behind the city, has protected status, and costs about three euros a piece. The other one is a paper cone of fried small fish from the market at eleven in the morning.

Pazar Green Market · 6 to 2 every day, and nothing takes a card
Peškarija Fish Market · 6.30 to noon, closed Sunday, and the small fish are cheapest
Villa Spiza · About 15 euros a plate, lunch and dinner, and just turn up
Konoba Fetivi · Fish and brodet in Varoš, and about 18 euros a main
Kantun Paulina · Ćevapi from a window, 7 euros, and a queue at one
Bokeria · A big room off Narodni trg, about 20 euros, and good at midnight
Zrno Soli · On the marina, about 30 euros, and the terrace is the reason
Bajamonti · Coffee on the Prokurative, and the best seat in the square

Museums in Split

Palace Cellars · 7 euros, the free corridor crosses them, and 10 degrees cooler
Archaeological Museum · 5 euros, from 1820, and the courtyard of sarcophagi is free
Meštrović Gallery · 10 euros, and the ticket covers Kaštelet down the road
Split City Museum · 5 euros, in the Papalić Palace, and the Gothic courtyard is free
Gallery of Fine Arts · 5 euros, in the old hospital, and the café terrace is open to all
Maritime Museum · 4 euros, in the Gripe fortress of 1657, and the torpedo room
Ethnographic Museum · 5 euros, and the roof terrace over the vestibule is included
Froggyland · 10 euros, twenty minutes, and nobody is ready for it

Nature and day trips near Split

Split is a peninsula with a forested hill on the end of it and a hundred islands in front, and almost all of it is free. The one thing to know is that the beaches on Marjan have shade and the beaches in town do not.

Marjan · Free, 314 steps from Varoš, and a café halfway up
Bene Beach · Free, pine shade right to the water, and the far end of Marjan
Kašjuni Beach · Free, under the south cliffs, and clearer than anything in town
Sustipan · Free, pines and a rotunda, and it was the cemetery until 1958
Omiš and the Cetina · 30 minutes east, and rafting is about 40 euros
Krka National Park · From 10 euros, 90 minutes out, and swimming banned since 2021
Zlatni Rat · Two hours out on Brač, and the ferry goes to Supetar
Vis · Two and a half hours out, and it was a closed military island until 1989

Things to do in Split with kids

Bačvice Beach · Free, sand, and shallow enough to walk out a hundred metres
Froggyland · 10 euros, 507 frogs in human scenes, and it takes twenty minutes
Game of Thrones Museum · 12 euros, costumes and a throne, and the cellars were filmed in
Bene Beach · Free, shade, a playground, and a path with no cars to get there
Maritime Museum · 4 euros, torpedoes and model ships inside a real fortress
Poljud Stadium · From 5 euros for the tour, and a match is from 10
Marjan steps · Free, 314 steps, and the viewpoint café is a third of the way up
Trogir · 30 minutes west, and the boat there is nicer than the bus

Nightlife in Split

Split goes out late and outdoors. Nothing in the palace has a dance floor worth the name — the clubs are on the beach at Bačvice, in a row above the sand, and they run until four in summer and are shut in winter. Inside the walls it is bars in courtyards, and the best of them has no sign.

Bačvice clubs · Free or 10 euros in, and summer only
Matejuška · Free, the breakwater, and bring your own — that is the custom
Charlie’s Bar · In a palace lane, loud and cheap, and it never empties
Bokeria · The late dinner that turns into drinks, and it runs till one
Prokurative · The concerts in summer, free, and the square holds three thousand
Vestibule · The klapa choir sings in it most evenings, free, and no stage
Riva · The evening walk, free, and the whole city is doing it at seven
Bajamonti · A late drink on the Prokurative, and quieter than the palace

Holy places in Split

Cathedral of St Domnius · 7 euros with the bell tower, and the tower is a hard climb
Jupiter’s Temple · 3 euros, two minutes inside, and it is one room
Peristyle · Free, and the Egyptian sphinx on the right is 3,500 years old
Grgur Ninski · Free, and he lost the argument he is standing there for
Kaštelet · In the gallery ticket, 28 walnut panels, and almost no light
Salona basilicas · 6 euros, 20 minutes out, and no shade at all
Trogir Cathedral · 5 euros, and the west portal was signed by Radovan in 1240
Marjan hermit chapels · Free, cut into the south cliffs, and a path runs between them

sleepntripFree cancellationEvery room we sell cancels for free

Plans change? Until the date on the card it costs nothing.

Find a room

Frequently asked questions about Split

What is there to see in Split?

The top sights in Split are Diocletian’s Palace, Peristyle and Cathedral of St Domnius. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Split?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Split without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Split?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Split, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: A city living inside one man’s house.

How do you get to Split and get around?

The main ways are Split Airport, Railway Station and Bus Station. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Split, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Split that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

Looking for a hotel in Split for your dates?

Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.

All hotels in Split

Plan a trip across CroatiaPearl of the Adriatic→