Zadar County

Behind the coast, the land is first a flat, stony plain of vineyards, olive groves and dry-stone walls, worked by people who have clearly been tending it for a long time. Then the ground lifts sharply into the Velebit range, where the Paklenica canyons cut deep grooves into grey limestone and the air turns cool under beech and pine. Out to sea the islands take on their own characters. Pag is bare and wind-scoured, a landscape of white stone and grazing sheep that gives its name to a hard, salty cheese. Dugi otok is longer and quieter, with pine and scrubby macchia along its ridges and inlets that feel shut off from the rest of the world. Each part changes the way you move through the day.

A day here tends to begin in Zadar, where the old town sits on a peninsula with its Roman stones still underfoot and its churches rising behind narrow streets. Down by the water, the sea organ hums as waves push air through its pipes, and a few steps away the circular plate of the Greeting to the Sun lies flat on the stone, catching the light. In the afternoon, Nin is slower. You can walk its causeway, look at the small, old church that is one of the oldest buildings in Croatia, and watch the salt flats shift colour as the wind moves over them. Later, a short crossing by boat carries you out to Ugljan or Pašman, where the pace drops again and the villages seem to have agreed among themselves to do nothing in a hurry.

What stays with you is the way the region keeps offering new edges. There is always another cove to reach by a track through the scrub, another hilltop where the Velebit shows its full height above the water, another harbour where fishing boats are being mended on the quay. Leaving at the end of a long day, you find yourself looking back at the coast and wanting to stay one more evening, to watch the light go over the islands and listen to the sea against the stones.