Rovinj to Split: A Full-Day Excursion by Private Car

Split is the longest excursion we run from Rovinj, and it is worth being straight about what that means: roughly 500 kilometres and five to five and a half hours of driving in each direction. As a single day it is possible with an early start and a professional driver, but ten to eleven hours behind the wheel for five or six hours in the city is a hard trade. Most guests who make this trip are better served by one night in Split — and the honest reason is below, along with everything the city gives you once you arrive.

Diocletian’s Palace: a Roman palace people still live in

The Emperor Diocletian had his retirement residence built here between roughly 295 and 305 AD, and he moved into it on abdicating on 1 May 305. It is a rectangle of about 215 by 180 metres — some three hectares — laid out like a Roman military camp, with walls rising over twenty metres on the seaward side and two colonnaded avenues crossing at the centre.

What makes it unlike any other Roman monument in Europe is that it never stopped being used. When nearby Salona was destroyed around 614 AD its refugees moved inside the palace walls and built their houses into the colonnades, and that improvised settlement became the city of Split. Around 3,000 people still live inside the palace today, along with the shops, bars and restaurants that fill its lanes. You do not queue to enter it; you walk into it, and it takes a moment to realise the wall beside you is seventeen hundred years old.

The historic core was inscribed by UNESCO in 1979 as the “Historical Complex of Split with the Palace of Diocletian”.

What to see inside the walls

• The Peristyle (Peristil) — the ceremonial court at the centre, framed by red granite columns, where Diocletian appeared before his subjects. An Egyptian sphinx roughly 3,500 years old still stands there, perfectly preserved. The acoustics are good enough that opera and theatre are staged in it.
• The Cathedral of Saint Domnius (Sveti Duje) — built as Diocletian’s mausoleum and finished in 305, converted to a church in the mid-seventh century. It is housed in the oldest building of any cathedral in the world still in use in its original structure. The irony is not subtle: the emperor of Rome’s last and harshest persecution of Christians lies at the heart of a cathedral dedicated to one of its martyrs.
• The bell tower — 57 metres, begun in the thirteenth century and finished in the sixteenth. It is a steep open climb and the view over the rooftops and the harbour is the best in the city.
• The substructures (podrumi) — the vaulted cellars that raised the imperial apartments above ground, among the best preserved ancient complexes of their kind anywhere. Because their plan mirrors the vanished rooms above, they are how archaeologists know what the emperor’s apartments looked like.
• The Golden Gate, the original main entrance on the north side, facing the road to Salona — and just outside it, Ivan Meštrović’s 8.5-metre statue of Gregory of Nin, the tenth-century bishop who argued for Croatian rather than Latin in the liturgy. Rubbing his big toe is said to bring luck; it has been polished to a shine.

Outside the walls

The Riva runs directly along the palace’s south wall, which was originally the sea gate — the water came right up to it. It took its present shape under Napoleonic rule after 1807 and became a pedestrian zone in the 1990s. It is where Split walks in the evening.

The palace is bracketed by its two markets: the Pazar green market against the east wall, loud with vendors, and the Peškarija fish market to the west. Behind the city, Marjan hill rises to 178 metres in dense pine forest, with thirteenth- and fifteenth-century chapels on its slopes and a view from the summit that takes in the whole city, the islands offshore and the Mosor and Kozjak mountains inland.

Game of Thrones

Split stood in for Meereen. Klis Fortress, on the ridge above the city, played Meereen itself, and the palace was a filming location from the fourth season onward — fans will recognise the substructures as the cellar where Daenerys chains her dragons, and the Peristyle from the Meereen street and market scenes. Klis is a genuine fortress with a genuine history: an Illyrian stronghold, then Roman, seat of the Croatian Duke Mislav around 835, held against the Ottomans for over twenty-five years by captain Petar Kružić before it fell in 1537, and retaken by Venice in 1648. It sits at 360 metres, eleven kilometres from the sea, right where the motorway drops toward Split — a twenty-minute stop before you even reach the Riva.

The drive

Rovinj to the Kanfanar interchange, the A8 east through the Učka tunnel, the A7 around Rijeka, the A6 to the Bosiljevo 2 interchange, and then the A1 south past Zadar and Šibenik to the Dugopolje exit above Split. About 500 km and five to five and a half hours in good conditions; longer on an August Saturday, when the coast road traffic and the toll barriers both back up.

Croatia has no vignette — tolls are charged by distance. The published rate from Zagreb to Split on the A1 is €26.40 for a car, and the Učka tunnel is billed separately from about €4.50. Realistically the whole run costs somewhere around €35 to €40 in tolls each way before fuel. In a private transfer that is inside the quoted price.

The Pelješac bridge you may have read about is on the route further south towards Dubrovnik and plays no part in this journey.

One day or one night? An honest answer

A 06:00 departure puts you in Split around 11:30. Leaving at 17:00 gets you home about 22:30. That is a sixteen-and-a-half hour day for roughly five hours on the ground, with the return leg driven in the dark. It is safe — that is what a professional driver is for — but it is not relaxing, and you will see Split at exactly the hours the cruise crowds are in it.

One night changes the trip completely. The palace is at its best early in the morning and after about seven in the evening, when the day visitors have gone and the lanes belong to the people who live in them. If your schedule allows it, we will drive you down one day and back the next.

Worth stopping for on the way

• Zadar is the best break on the drive, roughly two thirds of the way down and directly on the A1. On the waterfront, Nikola Bašić’s Sea Organ (2005) turns the swell into sound through resonant chambers under a flight of marble steps, and beside it the Greeting to the Sun (2008) is a 22-metre circle of 300 glass plates that charges in daylight and puts on a light show after sunset. Forty-five minutes here makes the journey a different kind of day.
• Krka National Park, near Šibenik, sits close to the motorway — but it needs half a day of its own and does not work as a stop on a Split run.
• Plitvice is inland and well off this line. It is a separate excursion, not a detour.

Plan your transfer

• Plitvice Lakes — the obvious stop on the way south
• Private day trips from Rovinj
• Get a fixed price for Split — day trip or one way