Zadar is the largest city on the central Dalmatian coast — a Roman, Byzantine, Venetian, Habsburg and finally Yugoslav town whose old peninsula is small enough to walk end to end in fifteen minutes and dense enough that you keep stopping. Cruise ships use one of two berths: Gaženica, the modern passenger port roughly three kilometres south of the old town, and Liva Pier on the eastern side of the peninsula itself, which only the smaller ships can use. The reason to come is the old town: the Roman forum still in its rectangle, the round ninth-century church of St. Donatus built on top of it, Nikola Bašić's Sea Organ playing seawater through pipes under the embankment, and his Greeting to the Sun light installation next to it — both finished in the 2000s, both genuinely good.
Zadar berths split. Most ships — Norwegian, Princess, Holland America, Celebrity, MSC, Costa, Marella, the larger Viking ocean ships — dock at Gaženica, a purpose-built passenger terminal opened in 2017 about three kilometres south of the old town on the mainland coast. There is a free shuttle to the edge of the peninsula on most call days, run by the cruise lines themselves, that drops at the footbridge by the marina; the walk in is fifteen minutes if you skip the shuttle. Smaller ships — Seabourn, Silversea, the Windstar yachts, the river-style Adriatic vessels — sometimes berth at Liva Pier on the eastern flank of the peninsula itself, putting you a five-minute walk from the Roman forum. The Gaženica/Liva split matters only for the first thirty minutes ashore; once you are on the peninsula the town is the same town.
The honest frame for the day: Zadar is a walking port. The old town is roughly 900 metres long and 300 metres wide, ringed by Venetian sea walls with the original sixteenth-century Land Gate (Kopnena vrata) on the landward side. Inside, the Roman forum laid out by Augustus in the first century BC still sits open as a public square, with carved column fragments lying where archaeologists left them and a single ninth-century pillar of shame standing at one end. St. Donatus Church, the round Byzantine-era pre-Romanesque rotunda built directly on the forum paving in the ninth century, is the architectural centrepiece — admission is €5, the interior is austere, the acoustics are why Zadar runs a summer music festival inside it. The Sea Organ and Greeting to the Sun, both designed by Croatian architect Nikola Bašić and completed in 2005 and 2008, sit on the western embankment where the peninsula meets the channel — the Sea Organ is a 70-metre stretch of marble steps with thirty-five pipes underneath that play continuous, unrepeatable chords as waves push air through them, and the Greeting to the Sun is a 22-metre circle of photovoltaic glass tiles flush with the pavement that charges all day and then lights in slow shifting patterns from sunset. Both are free. The two main day trips out of Zadar are Plitvice Lakes National Park (roughly two hours each way by coach, sixteen waterfalls cascading through travertine pools, the headline UNESCO site of inland Croatia) and Krka National Park (roughly an hour and a half each way, lower-altitude waterfalls, Skradinski Buk the famous main fall). Plitvice is the better park; Krka is the realistic park for a cruise day. Pag cheese (Paški sir), the sharp sheep's milk cheese from the island of Pag an hour up the coast, is the regional speciality you will see on every menu.
