Why Croatia
There are countries that are gradually revealing themselves. Croatia, on the other hand, is immediately striking: as soon as you get off the plane in Dubrovnik, you find yourself under honey-coloured medieval ramparts, facing a blue sea that exists nowhere else in the Mediterranean. All this is just two hours from Paris. It is no coincidence that Alfred Hitchcock referred to Zadar as the place that offers "the most beautiful sunset in the world".
Croatia's strength lies in this density of emotions: in the morning at the turquoise waterfalls of the Plitvice Lakes, in the afternoon in the alleys of a Roman palace still inhabited in Split, and in the evening on the deck of a ferry that goes to Hvar under the stars. Nowhere in Europe does one go so quickly from the monument to the wild cove.
The country has also managed to keep its soul. Behind the summer mass tourism, a sincere gastronomy resists: octopus grilled on the coals, Istrian prsut, Malvasia wines golden as amber, white truffles picked in Istria at dawn. And a culture of its own, proud, which does not dissolve in internationalisation.
