Rožanski and Hajdučki Kukovi Strict Reserve, part of the North Velebit National Park. The Velebit massif, spanning 145 km, is the longest mountain in Croatia and the fourth highest, culminating at 1,757 m, after Dinara (1831 m), Kamešnica (1809 m) and Biokovo (1762 m).

The amphitheatre in Pula, known as the Arena, built in the first century, the sixth largest in the Roman Empire, could host 25,000 spectators. Today, it is used for large cultural and sporting events.

Neptune's Fountain at the Trsteno Arboretum, founded in 1498 and the oldest arboretum in the world. According to the World Tourism Organization, with nearly 9.9 million foreign tourists in 2011, Croatia was the 6th Mediterranean tourist destination after France, Spain, Italy, Turkey and Greece.

Croatia is administratively divided into 20 counties and the City of Zagreb, which has the status of a county. Each county has particular competence for general education, health, land use, economic development, transport and its infrastructure, and the development of educational and cultural institutions.

The Croats put the Glagolitic script into print in the very earliest period of European printing, in the 15th century, and five incunabula were printed in Glagolitic. The incunabulum, Glagolitic Missal, was published on 22 February 1483, in Croatian Church Slavonic, only 28 years after Gutenberg’s Bible. It is the first ever missal in Europe to have been printed in a non-Latin script, and the perfection of the letters and the beauty of the typesetting and printing make it an absolute masterpiece of the printer’s art.

Rivers and lakes

About 62% of the territory covered by the branching river network belongs to the Black Sea catchment basin. The longest Croatian rivers, the River Sava (562 km) and River Drava (505 km) also belong to this catchment basin, as does the Danube ...

Film production

The history of professional Croatian cinematography began only in the mid 20th century, although the first preserved films of Croatian places were made as early as 1898 by Alexandra Promio of the famous film company Lumière, and in 1904 ...

Literature

Croatian medieval literature, unique in being produced in three languages (Latin, Old Slavonic and the vernacular) and three scripts (Roman, Glagolitic and Cyrillic) developed from the 8th to 16th century in the form of poetry, verse dialogue ...

Counties

The basic units of regional self-government are the counties (županija in Croatian). The present administrative territorial division of the country was introduced in 1997, when the 1992 division was changed. Smaller administrative territorial units within counties ...

Development of the state

The names Croat and Croatia in the country as it is today have gradually superseded the ethnically wider concept of the Slavs and their first territorial groupings, Sklavonija, Slovinje (Sclaviniae), and the individual ...

Regions

The region of modern Croatia covers a large number of historical and geographical regions of different origins and size. These reflect the political fragmentation of the Croatian lands in the past, and partly also the position of Croatia at the meeting-point ...

Contemporary Croatia

The process of the emergence of the contemporary state of Croatia began with the crisis in Communism in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, the strengthening of democratic movements and the restoration of multi-party systems. Such movements ...

Croatia in brief

Croatia has been present on the contemporary international political stage since its independence from the Yugoslav Federation, i.e. for a little over two decades, but in terms of history and culture, is one of the oldest European countries ...