6 Best Sights in Northern Dalmatia, Croatia

The whimsically named The Greeting to the Sun is a 22-meter circle of multilayered glass plates set into the stone-paved waterfront. Under the glass, light-sensitive solar modules soak up the sun's energy during daylight hours, turning it into electrical energy. Just after sunset, it puts on an impressive light show, illuminating the waterfront in shades of blue, green, red, and yellow. It was installed in 2008 and was created by local architect Nikola Bašić, who also made the nearby sound art project, the Sea Organ.

Comprising 35 pipes under the quay stretching along a 230-foot stretch of Zadar's atmospheric Riva promenade, the Sea Organ yields a never-ending concert that delights one and all. Designed by architect Nikola Bašić with the help of other experts, the organ's sound resembles a whale song, but it is, in fact, the sea itself. It's hard not to be in awe as the sound of the sea undulates in rhythm and volume with the waves.

Established in the 1st century BC by the first emperor Augustus, the Roman Forum is, more than 2,000 years later, a vast empty space with some scattered ruins. However, since it was rediscovered in the 1930s and restored to its present condition in the 1960s, the Forum has been one of Zadar's most important public spaces. A raised area on the western flank indicates the site of a one-time temple dedicated to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva. If you look closely, you will notice what remains of its altars that served as venues for blood sacrifices. The only surviving column was used in the Middle Ages as a "Pillar of Shame," to which wayward individuals were chained. Fragments of a second column were removed from the Forum in 1729 and put back together again near the Square of Five Wells, where the column still stands today.

A walk around the walls of Zadar's Old Town is a walk around what was once the largest city-fortress in the Venetian Republic. One of the finest Venetian-era monuments in Dalmatia, the Land Gate was built in 1543 by the small Foša harbor as the main entrance to the city. It takes the form of a triumphal arch, with a large central passage for vehicles and two side entrances for pedestrians. It is decorated with reliefs of St. Chrysogonus (Zadar's foremost patron saint) on his horse and a winged lion (the symbol of the Venetian Republic).

One of the Old Town's two main public spaces, the ever-bustling Narodni trg is home to the Gradska straža (City Sentinel), which was designed by a Venetian architect in late-Renaissance style with a large central clock tower. The sentinel's stone barrier and railing, complete with holes for cannons, were added later. This impressive tower once housed the ethnographic section of the National Museum and is today a venue for various regular cultural exhibits.

The square is the site of a large cistern built by the Venetians in the 1570s to help Zadar endure sieges by the Turks. The cistern has five wells that still look serviceable, even though they have long been sealed shut. Much later, in 1829, Baron Franz Ludwig von Welden, a passionate botanist, established a park above an adjacent pentagonal bastion built to keep the Turks at bay.