Explore Zadar

The Museum of Ancient Glass occupies the Cosmacendi Palace, a Neoclassical building of 1877 on a former bastion of Zadar's walls, and opened in 2009. It shows Roman glass from Zadar and the surrounding region, including bottles, cups, jewellery and cinerary urns, and in a workshop inside the museum glassmakers demonstrate free-blowing and lampwork.

The Archaeological Museum Zadar was founded in 1832 and is the second-oldest museum in Croatia. Its building beside the Roman forum shows finds from Zadar County on three floors: medieval objects on the ground floor, Roman Iader and the region in antiquity on the first floor, and prehistory from the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age on the second.

The Church of St. Donatus is a round Pre-Romanesque church built in the 9th century on the Roman forum of Zadar and named after Bishop Donatus, who is credited with building it. The 27-metre rotunda has three apses and an upper gallery, and stones from Roman buildings are set in its foundations. It no longer holds services and is used for concerts.

Zadar Cathedral, dedicated to St. Anastasia, is a three-aisled Romanesque basilica built in the 12th and 13th centuries on the site of a 4th–5th century church, with a west front of 1324 that has two rose windows. The 56-metre bell tower beside it was begun in the 15th century, completed in the 1890s to plans by Thomas Graham Jackson, and can be climbed.

The Sea Organ is a flight of white stone steps on Zadar's waterfront, designed by the architect Nikola Bašić and opened in 2005. Pipes built under the steps along about 75 metres of the quay sound as waves push air through them, so the chords change with the sea. It lies next to Bašić's Greeting to the Sun at the western tip of the old town peninsula.

The Greeting to the Sun is a circle 22 metres across set into the stone paving of Zadar's waterfront at the tip of the peninsula, designed by the architect Nikola Bašić. Its 300 glass plates cover solar modules that power a light show after dark, and smaller discs beside it stand for the planets of the Solar System.