Split is the only city built inside a Roman palace, where residents still live behind 3rd-century walls. Beyond the Peristyle lies Salona's vanished Roman capital, Klis fortress, Venetian bastions and the Yugoslav-era monuments most visitors walk straight past.
Capital of Roman Dalmatia and Diocletian's birthplace, home to 60,000 people before Avar-Slav raids emptied it in the 7th century. Walk the amphitheatre foundations, Manastirine necropolis and early Christian basilicas. Open 09:00–19:00 summer.
A ridge fortress held by Illyrians, Romans, Croatian kings and finally the Ottomans in 1537 after Petar Kružić's uskoks lost it. Open 09:30–19:00 summer; the museum in the barracks displays Ottoman and Venetian arms.
Croatia's oldest museum, founded 1820, holding Salona's finest sarcophagi including the 4th-century Good Shepherd and Phaedra & Hippolytus pieces. The arcaded garden lapidarium is packed with Greek and Roman inscriptions from Vis and Solin.
A tiny 5th-century chapel squeezed into the guard corridor above the Porta Aurea, barely 1.6m wide, with a 9th-century Croatian pre-Romanesque altar screen carved by Dominic the Priest. Reached by a stair beside the Dominican convent.
Ivan Meštrović's own 1930s villa on Marjan's southern slope, holding 200 works he donated to Croatia in 1952 before permanent exile. Open 09:00–19:00 Tue–Sun in summer; closed Mondays. Terraced gardens face the Adriatic.
A neo-Renaissance three-sided square modelled on Venice's Piazza San Marco, built in the 1860s under mayor Antonio Bajamonti during the Habsburg era. Its ochre arcades hosted the Split Festival, Croatia's answer to Sanremo, from 1960 onward.
Housed in the 15th-century Gothic palace of the Papalić nobles, with Juraj Dalmatinac's carved portal intact. Displays run from medieval communal statutes to Venetian weapons and 19th-century Split. Open 09:00–21:00 summer, €8.
The working boat harbour where Split's fishing families have moored since the 19th century, with the stone breakwater and hauling ramp still in use. The adjacent Veli Varoš lanes were the poor fishermen's quarter outside the Venetian walls.
Europe's third-oldest active synagogue, converted from two palace-wall houses around 1510 by Sephardic refugees from Spain. Survived a 1942 fascist ransacking; the ark and 18th-century Torah scrolls remain in use by a community of about 100.
The 17th-century stone quarter west of the palace where farmers and fishermen built dry-stone houses up Marjan's slope. Narrow stepped lanes, the Romanesque St Nicholas church of 1069 and communal wells survive largely unaltered.
Diocletian's Temple of Jupiter, converted to a baptistery in the 6th century, with an intact coffered barrel vault of 64 carved panels and an 11th-century font showing a Croatian king enthroned — the oldest such image in the country.
The 17th-century Venetian Gripe bastion, raised during the Candian War against the Ottomans, now houses the Croatian Maritime Museum with Adriatic torpedo history — the first torpedo was developed in nearby Rijeka in 1866.