Zadar

The city that installed a musical instrument in its seafront

After the Second World War Zadar’s waterfront was rebuilt as a plain concrete wall. In 2005 the architect Nikola Bašić cut a broad flight of marble steps into it and hid 35 polyethylene pipes beneath, tuned to seven chords. Waves push air through them; the sea plays. Nothing is amplified, nothing is programmed, and the music changes with the weather. Beside it, the Greeting to the Sun — a 22-metre circle of photovoltaic glass plates — absorbs light all day and releases it after dark in slow patterns.

That combination is the whole character of Zadar. It is a working city rather than an open-air museum: students, a Monday fish market, a cathedral campanile you can climb, Roman columns lying where they were dropped. Prices are noticeably lower than Split and roughly half of Dubrovnik, and it is the most convenient base in the country for combining a national park, an archipelago and a beach in the same week.