Dalmatia

Dalmatia is the long limestone coast of Croatia, a strip of pale mountains, walled harbor towns, and island chains along the eastern Adriatic. Split grew up inside the retirement palace of the Roman emperor Diocletian, Dubrovnik was for centuries an independent merchant republic, and Venice left its winged lion on town gates from Zadar to Kotor. Dalmatia has no legal status in Croatia today, but it remains a living historical region and the country's best-known one, and the summer tourism that fills its old towns is a mainstay of the Croatian economy. It also lent its name to the spotted Dalmatian dog, though where the breed actually began is still debated.

Dalmatia runs roughly 400 kilometers from the island of Rab and the Velebit range in the north to the Bay of Kotor in the south, squeezed between the sea and the Dinaric Alps, whose highest summit in Croatia, Dinara at 1,831 meters, stands near the Bosnian border. Behind the coast lie dry karst plateaus cut by the gorges of the Krka and Cetina rivers, and offshore lie dozens of large islands, including Brač, Hvar, and Korčula. The region covers about 12,190 square kilometers and had about 804,000 people in 2021, nearly all in Croatia, where it roughly matches the counties of Zadar, Šibenik-Knin, Split-Dalmatia, and Dubrovnik-Neretva. The Bay of Kotor, the southern end of Austrian Dalmatia, belongs to Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina's short coastline at Neum cuts Croatian Dalmatia in two.

Rome organized the coast and its hinterland as the province of Dalmatia, named for the Delmatae tribe, and Croats settled there in the 7th century. Croatian-Hungarian kings, Byzantium, and Venice contested its towns until Venice bought the rival claim in 1409 and ruled most of the coast until 1797, while the Ottomans held much of the interior. Dubrovnik stayed independent, and in 1699 it gave the Neum strip to the Ottomans as a buffer against Venice, the reason Bosnia touches the sea there today. After a Napoleonic interlude, Austria ruled the region as the Kingdom of Dalmatia from 1815 to 1918. Italy held Zadar between the world wars and annexed much of the coast during the Second World War. Dalmatia then passed to Yugoslavia and, in 1991, to independent Croatia.

• Bosnia and Herzegovina
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• Austria-Hungary
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• The Roman Empire
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• Yugoslavia
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• The Republic of Venice
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• Adriatic Sea
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• Croatia
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• Montenegro
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