Zagreb

Most people give Zagreb one night on the way to somewhere with a sea in it, which misses the thing Zagreb is doing right now that nowhere else on the route is: rebuilding itself in public. At 6:24 on the Sunday morning of 22 March 2020, a magnitude 5.5 earthquake went off under the city centre. It damaged 26,197 buildings and left 1,900 unusable, and six years on the historic core still runs on scaffolding and netting. A fair number of the addresses in older guidebooks are behind a fence.

So the useful version of Zagreb in 2026 is the one that knows what is open — and two of the closures everyone complained about ended this year.

The cathedral came back in April

The most-photographed building in Zagreb spent six years as a building site. The quake dropped one of its spires onto the Archbishop's Palace next door; the other started leaning, and on 17 April 2020 engineers took it down with explosives. Around 4,000 blocks of stone came off the towers to be scanned and labelled so each can go back to the millimetre, this time on a steel frame.

Zagreb Cathedral reopened to visitors on 17 April 2026 — six years to the day after that demolition. The number that tells you what happened: it stood 108 metres before the earthquake and stands 73.6 metres now. Nearly a third has gone and both towers are stumps. Entry is free, doors 08:00–19:00 daily, Sunday Mass at 10:00. You will not see the skyline that is on every postcard, which is the reason to go now.

An earthquake in 1880 did much the same to the same building, and the man who put it back together was Herman Bollé, a Cologne-born architect who then spent fifty years redrawing Zagreb. Hold his name.

Bollé's other job, ten minutes uphill

Mirogoj is the cemetery Bollé built, and from the road it does not read as one. What faces you is 500 metres of neo-Renaissance arcade under twenty domes, begun in 1879 and unfinished until 1929 — a colonnade the length of a shopping street with the dead filed behind its walls. The city opened it in 1876 on terms unusual for the time: every denomination on one site. Catholic, Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish and Protestant sections sit inside the same wall, and reading the names across them is the shortest course in this region's twentieth century going.

It is free, open 06:00–20:00 April to September and 07:30–18:00 otherwise, and bus 106 runs up from beside the cathedral in ten minutes.

Mornings are for Dolac

Dolac opened at eight in the morning on 1 September 1930, after the city flattened a block of houses between the main square and the cathedral to get its scattered street traders into one place. It is still where Zagreb buys food. The upper level is open air under rows of deep red parasols — they have their own name, šestinski kišobran, painted in the pattern of the folk costume of Šestine — with produce and, at the far end, fish that came up from the Adriatic that morning. Underneath, by stairs or a lift, a covered hall holds the butchers and the dairy stalls.

It runs 07:00–15:00 Monday to Saturday and shuts at 13:00 on Sunday, but be there by one: stalls pack up when they have sold out.

One dish, and you wait for it

La Štruk, a minute uphill from Dolac on Skalinska, serves štrukli and essentially nothing else. Štrukli is thin dough with fresh cottage cheese, sour cream and egg; the only real decision is boiled or baked. Boiled arrives soft in its own cream at €10; baked comes browned on top for €11 or so, in savoury versions and in sweet ones that run to apple and cinnamon. Each portion is assembled after you order it, so budget twenty minutes before anything reaches the table. Open 11:00–22:00.

Objects that strangers posted in

The Museum of Broken Relationships at Ćirilometodska 2 began when two Zagreb artists, Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić, split up in 2003 and joked about where the leftovers of a relationship are supposed to go. Three years later it was a touring exhibition; in 2010 it settled in the Upper Town. Everything in it was posted in by a member of the public with a short anonymous caption, and of nearly 3,000 contributions about 15% is shown at a time. The captions are the exhibit, and it stays open until 22:00 in summer — one of the few things here you can do late.

When the lamplighter comes round

There are 214 working gas lanterns in the Upper Town, Kaptol and Opatovina, survivors of a network of 364 first lit on 31 October 1863, and Zagreb is the only city that still lights them by hand. Two men do it, twice a day, every day of the year. Each lantern keeps a pilot flame; the lamplighter arrives with a stick about three metres long, cut to his own height, hooks a lever, and the mantle catches. They split the route and come back before sunrise to put them out.

Be up there just before dark and you will meet one of them working, and can follow a street lighting itself ahead of you. That hour moves with the calendar: high summer means waiting until late evening, December means mid-afternoon.

Second-hand Friday at Britanac

Britanski trg — Britanac to anyone who lives here — is an ordinary produce market that becomes something else four days a week, and the timetable is the point. Thursday it sells porcelain, glass, ceramics and jewellery, 07:00 to 18:00. Friday is Liberplac, a second-hand book fair, all day. Saturday and Sunday bring antiques and general old stuff, 07:00 to 14:30. It is fifteen minutes west of the main square on foot and costs nothing to walk through — the right answer to a wet Friday.

A day on the mountain

Zagreb keeps a mountain inside its own public transport map. Medvednica is reached by gondola from Gračansko Dolje at the end of tram line 15: 5,017 metres of cable, 754 metres of climb, 22 minutes in a ten-person cabin, topping out at 1,030 metres where there are marked trails and somewhere to eat. It shuts one to three days most months for inspection, and the operator posts the dates ahead, so check before you give it a day.

Still shut, and newly back

The Mimara Museum is still closed for post-earthquake reconstruction; do not plan around it. The Archaeological Museum reopened in July 2024 after a €2 million rebuild and holds the strangest object in the country — an Egyptian mummy whose linen wrappings carry the Liber Linteus Zagrabiensis, the longest surviving text in Etruscan and the only linen book left from antiquity. And the funicular, shut since January 2025, reopened on 19 May 2026 after a €9.1 million overhaul. It is 66 metres long, the ride takes 64 seconds, and it costs 66 cents.