Lika-Senj

Inland, the land is a high karst plateau, open and wind-combed, where villages sit far apart and fields are edged by low dry walls. Gospić, the administrative centre, has the plain practicality of a town that serves the farms and forests around it. Further on, the country tightens into wooded hills and sudden valleys, and the air grows colder and cleaner. Here the waterfalls of Plitvik give the region its best-known face: a chain of turquoise lakes stepping down through beech and fir, with wooden walkways running along the edges so you can hear the water moving under the leaves. The interior feels patient and a little austere, as if it has learned to keep its counsel through long winters.

The coast changes the mood entirely. Senj is a small harbour town of stone houses and narrow lanes climbing toward a fortress, and its history of sea captains and smugglers is still legible in the walls. Walking its quay, you feel the bora before you see it, a dry, cold wind that comes down off the mountain and flattens the harbour water into hard ridges. Along the shore towards Karlobag and Jablanac, the road turns through pine and scrub, and the sea appears in pieces between headlands, each cove a different shade of green. Jablanac is a quiet port with the air of a place that exists mainly to be crossed, its jetty busy with the practical business of the channel. A day here can be a slow sequence of small things: bread still warm from a bakery, the smell of resin on the hillside, a long pause at the water's edge with the mountain behind you.

What stays with a visitor is the contrast between the two halves of the region, the cold stone plateau and the salt-bright shore, held together by one dramatic line of mountain. You leave wanting the sound of those waterfalls in the morning and the sight of Velebit turning colour at dusk, and you find yourself thinking of a return before the road has even climbed out of sight of the sea.