For the best part of 20 years, the world’s top DJs and hundreds of thousands of music lovers have beaten a path to this celebrated strip of the Adriatic coast, mainly to two sites: Tisno, as discovered and adapted by the pioneering Garden club/festival in Zadar; and Zrće, near Novalja on Pag island, where seminal Zagreb club Aquarius set up its summer satellite alongside other stages way back when.
➡️ READ MORE: The best music festivals to book in Europe
These locations are then rented out to various ambitious promoters, many from the UK, including Edinburgh’s V Festival crew, now happily returning to Tisno for the third time of asking. More unusual locations include a former quarry used by the Ancient Romans outside Pula and the shores of a lake in Zagreb created for the World Student Games of 1987. Note that for many events, festival and day passes sell out fast, so you’ll have to investigate the resale market if you miss out – also advertised on festival websites.
Peterjon Cresswell is a writer and editor at Time Out Budapest, and was until recently the editor of Time Out Croatia. At Time Out, all of our travel guides are written by experts across Europe. For more about how we curate, see our editorial guidelines. This guide may include affiliate links, which have no influence on our editorial content. For more information, see our affiliate guidelines.
