Zagreb: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
Zagreb was two separate settlements on two hills with a stream between them — Gradec, the free royal town of merchants and craftsmen, and Kaptol, which belonged to the bishop. They had their own walls, their own courts and their own markets, and they fought each other often enough that the bridge over the stream was called the Bloody Bridge. They were only joined into one city in 1850. Two hours, and the funicular saves the climb.
A short history of Zagreb
Zagreb grew out of two neighbouring, rival hills. On one, Kaptol, King Ladislaus founded the bishopric in 1094. On the other, Gradec, the inhabitants received the Golden Bull in 1242 from King Béla IV, who made it a free royal town in gratitude for the refuge it had given him from the Mongols. For centuries the two hills were in dispute, and only in 1850 were they officially united into one city. An earthquake in 1880 badly damaged the city, and much of its centre was rebuilt afterwards. In 1991 Zagreb became the capital of independent Croatia, and in March 2020 it was struck by an earthquake again.
The ten best sights in Zagreb
1Zagreb CathedralFree, and the spires have been rebuilt twice after earthquakes
2St Mark’s ChurchFree to look from outside, and the tiled roof is the picture
3Stone GateFree, a city gate that is also a chapel, and people pray inside it
4Lotrščak Tower5 euros, and the cannon fires at noon every day
5Museum of Broken Relationships7 euros, objects left by strangers, and read the labels
6Museum of Naive Art5 euros, paintings on the back of glass, and one room is enough
7Zagreb City Museum5 euros, in a former convent, and the model of the old city is the thing
8Mimara Museum5 euros, a collection one man gave the state, and half of it is argued about
9Museum of Contemporary Art5 euros, across the river, and there is a slide you ride down
10Museum of Arts and Crafts5 euros, by Hermann Bollé, and the furniture rooms are the best
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What is an audio walk?
Tours in Zagreb →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 Zagreb:
Free walking tours in Zagreb
Two towns that fought for six hundred years
Zagreb was two separate settlements on two hills with a stream between them — Gradec, the free royal town of merchants and craftsmen, and Kaptol, which belonged to the bishop. They had their own walls, their own courts and their own markets, and they fought each other often enough that the bridge over the stream was called the Bloody Bridge. They were only joined into one city in 1850. Two hours, and the funicular saves the climb.
- Dolac Market · The market was built in 1930 on top of a whole demolished block, deliberately placed on the line where Gradec and Kaptol used to end, so that for the first time both halves of the city would shop in the same place. The red umbrellas are regulation — the stallholders are issued them.
- Zagreb Cathedral · This was the bishop’s town, and the cathedral has been knocked down by the ground twice: the earthquake of 1880 brought the old tower down, and on the twenty-second of March 2020 another one took the top of the south spire off in the first week of the pandemic lockdown. The walls around it were built against the Ottomans.
- Tkalčićeva · A stream called the Medveščak ran down this street and it was the border between the two towns. There were mills and tanneries along it, the bridge across was known as the Bloody Bridge after the fights, and the whole thing was covered over in 1898. The bar terraces are standing on the water.
- Stone Gate · The last of Gradec’s four gates. In the great fire of 1731 everything wooden in the passage burned, and a painting of the Virgin was found in the ashes untouched — so the gate was turned into a chapel around it. People sit on wooden benches inside a medieval city gate, under the traffic, and light candles.
- St Mark’s Church · The roof everyone photographs was only laid in 1880, during Bollé’s restoration: on the left the arms of Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia, on the right the arms of Zagreb. The square it stands in is the quietest place in the old town and also the seat of the government, which is in the building to one side.
- Lotrščak Tower · A cannon has been fired from this tower at midday every day since the first of January 1877, and for decades it was how the whole city set its clocks — the bell ringers of every church waited for it. The name comes from campana latrunculorum, the thieves’ bell, which was rung at night to warn that the gates were closing.
The green horseshoe
When Zagreb spread off the hills onto the plain in the 1880s, an engineer called Milan Lenuci laid the new town out as a horseshoe of eight squares, each one a park, with the museums and institutions placed around them — so the city grew with its green already built in rather than squeezed in afterwards. Walking the horseshoe is how you see nineteenth-century Zagreb deciding what it wanted to be. Two and a half hours, flat, and almost all of it is shaded.
- Zrinjevac · The first square of the horseshoe, and until 1873 it was the cattle market. The plane trees were planted in 1872, the music pavilion was ordered in 1891, and the stone column in the middle is a working meteorological station from 1884 that still shows temperature, pressure and humidity to anyone walking past.
- King Tomislav Square · The square was laid out as the face the city shows anyone arriving by train, which is why the station is at one end and the Art Pavilion at the other. The statue is of a king who ruled around the year 925 and of whom almost nothing is certainly known, including whether he was ever crowned.
- Art Pavilion · The iron frame of this building stood in Budapest in 1896 as the Croatian pavilion at the Hungarian millennium exhibition. When the fair ended it was taken apart, loaded onto trains, brought to Zagreb and put up again here in 1898 with a new skin on it — a building that arrived by rail.
- Esplanade Hotel · Built in 1925 specifically for passengers of the Orient Express, which stopped at the station three hundred metres away, and the walk from the platform was meant to be short enough to do in evening dress. Orson Welles, Josephine Baker and Elizabeth Taylor all stayed, and the cake in the café is still called the Esplanade šnita.
- Croatian National Theatre · Fellner and Helmer, the Viennese firm that built nearly fifty theatres across the empire, put this one up in 1895 and the emperor came to open it. The well of blue glass in front of it is a work by Ivan Meštrović from 1912 called the Well of Life, and people throw coins into it although nobody asked them to.
- Museum of Arts and Crafts · Founded in 1880 with a specific argument behind it: that machines were killing craft, and that the only way to save it was to collect the best old work and put apprentices in front of it. The school was built into the same block as the museum, and it is still there.
The other side of the tracks
Everything south of the railway was fields until the Sava was embanked after the flood of 1964, and then Novi Zagreb went up — a socialist new town of blocks, built fast for people who came in from the villages. It has the contemporary art museum, a tunnel nobody used for seventy years, a cemetery that is one of the finest buildings in the country, and a mountain. Half a day, and the tram does most of it.
- Grič Tunnel · Dug in 1943 as an air-raid shelter under the upper town, with six entrances, and then simply forgotten — it stood locked and empty for seventy years, used once in the 1990s as a rave venue. The city opened it as a public passage in 2016 and it is now a shortcut most tourists never find.
- Museum of Broken Relationships · Two Zagreb artists broke up in 2003 and could not decide what to do with the things they had shared, so they asked other people to send theirs with a note. It travelled the world as a touring show, won a European museum prize in 2011, and the objects are ordinary — a toaster, an axe, a wedding dress in a jar.
- Mirogoj Cemetery · Hermann Bollé designed it in 1876 on land that had been the garden of Ljudevit Gaj, the man who standardised written Croatian. Catholics, Orthodox, Muslims, Jews and those of no faith are buried along the same ivy-covered arcade, which was unusual then and is still rare in this part of Europe.
- Museum of Contemporary Art · The building opened in Novi Zagreb in 2009 and has a steel slide by Carsten Höller running through it from the top floor to the ground — you can ride it, and it is part of the collection rather than an attraction bolted on. The gallery holds the best collection of Yugoslav conceptual art anywhere.
- Bundek · The two lakes are gravel pits. The material dug out of here went into the embankments built after the flood of October 1964, when the Sava came over its banks and drowned part of the city — seventeen people died and forty thousand were left homeless, and the whole shape of modern Zagreb follows from that week.
- Medvedgrad · A fortress built on the mountain in the 1250s after the Mongols came through and burned everything on the plain — the king ordered a refuge on high ground that no horse army could take. An earthquake ruined it in 1590, it was left as rubble for four hundred years, and it was rebuilt in the 1990s.
Getting to Zagreb and getting around
- Franjo Tuđman Airport · The shuttle to the bus station is 8 euros and takes 30 minutes
- Glavni kolodvor · From 1892, and the Orient Express stopped here
- Autobusni kolodvor · Buses to Split, Ljubljana and Belgrade, and left luggage downstairs
- Ban Jelačić Square · Every tram in the city passes through here
Cheap eats in Zagreb
Eight counters where Zagreb eats standing. The morning is burek from a bakery window, about two euros, taken in paper and eaten walking. The lunch that matters is štrukli — sheets of thin dough rolled round fresh cottage cheese, either baked till the top blisters or boiled and served in their own cream — and it is the dish of the Zagorje hills north of the city, not of the coast. A plate is six to nine euros.
- Dolac Market · Open 7 to 2, and almost nothing is left after one
- Britanac Market · Smaller and nearer the flats, and antiques on Sunday morning
- Pivnica Medvedgrad · A litre is about 4 euros, and the terrace is big
- Stari Fijaker · Štrukli and beans since 1945, and about 10 euros a plate
- Submarine Burger · A counter, no table service, and about 8 euros
- Mali Bar · Small plates, a dozen seats, and booking is the only way in
- Cogito Coffee · About 2 euros, and Saturday morning is the ritual
- Amelie · Cakes and good coffee, and the kremšnita is the one to order
Museums in Zagreb
- Museum of Broken Relationships · 7 euros, an hour, and the labels take longer than the objects
- Museum of Naive Art · 5 euros, one floor, and forty minutes is plenty
- Zagreb City Museum · 5 euros, in a convent of 1650, and the scale models are the best part
- Mimara Museum · 5 euros, closed Mondays, and the building alone is worth it
- Museum of Contemporary Art · 5 euros, across the river, and there is a slide you ride down
- Museum of Arts and Crafts · 5 euros, Bollé’s building, and the clock collection is quietly great
- Technical Museum · 4 euros, a walk-through mine in the basement, and a planetarium
- Klovićevi dvori · From 7 euros, a Jesuit monastery, and one big show at a time
Parks and gardens in Zagreb
There is a mountain at the top of the tram line and a river at the bottom of it, and between them the city planted eight squares in a row in the 1880s. Everything on this list is free except the zoo and the cave.
- Maksimir Park · Free, tram 11 or 12 to the gate, and 316 hectares
- Sljeme · Free to walk, and the cable car is about 5 euros
- Jarun Lake · Free, a rowing course dug in 1987, and six kilometres round it
- Bundek · Free, two lakes, and the quieter of the two city beaches
- Botanical Garden · Free, from 1889, and shut from November to March
- Zrinjevac · Free, plane trees and a bandstand, and a working weather column
- Medvedgrad · Free, a rebuilt 13th-century fortress, and an hour’s walk up
- Veternica Cave · 7 euros, guided only, and April to October
Things to do in Zagreb with kids
- Zagreb Zoo · 10 euros, inside Maksimir, and two hours covers it
- Museum of Illusions · 8 euros, an hour, and the tilted room is the one they remember
- Technical Museum · 4 euros, a mine you walk through, and the Tesla demo is hourly
- Funicular · 0.66 euros, 64 seconds, and worth doing twice
- Maksimir Park · Free, five lakes, and playgrounds by the main gate
- Bundek · Free, shallow water and a big playground, and shade
- Lotrščak Tower · 5 euros, and be there a minute before noon for the cannon
- Sljeme · The cable car up, and snow from December to March
Live music in Zagreb
- Vatroslav Lisinski Hall · From 15 euros, and the big hall seats 1,850
- Croatian National Theatre · From 10 euros, opera and ballet, and the house is 1895 Viennese
- Vintage Industrial Bar · A warehouse near the station, loud guitars, and cheap
- Arena Zagreb · 15,000 seats, the stadium tours, and tram 7 goes there
- Kino Europa · From 1925, art films and festivals, and a café in the foyer
- Dom likovnih umjetnika · From 4 euros, and the shows change every few weeks
- Tkalčićeva · The bar street, busy from nine, and nobody queues
- Jarun Lake · The summer clubs are on the lakeshore, and they run till four
Holy places in Zagreb
- Zagreb Cathedral · Free, and the treasury is a separate small ticket
- St Mark’s Church · Free from outside, and Meštrović carved the crucifix inside
- Stone Gate · Free, a chapel inside a city gate, and candles burn all day
- Mirogoj Cemetery · Free, four faiths along one arcade, and the ivy is the point
- Marija Bistrica · Free, 40 minutes north, and busy on 15 August
- Kaptol · The bishop’s town, and the canons’ houses line the one street
- Opatovina · The Franciscan church and the oldest surviving wall of Kaptol
- Croatian History Museum · 4 euros, and it explains the four flags on St Mark’s roof
Frequently asked questions about Zagreb
What is there to see in Zagreb?
The top sights in Zagreb are Zagreb Cathedral, St Mark’s Church and Stone Gate. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Zagreb?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Zagreb without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Zagreb?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Zagreb, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Two towns that fought for six hundred years.
How do you get to Zagreb and get around?
The main ways are Franjo Tuđman Airport, Glavni kolodvor and Autobusni kolodvor. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Zagreb, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Zagreb 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 Zagreb for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.