2 Best Sights in Northern Dalmatia, Croatia

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.