Croatia

Croatia is organised into two worlds: the continental one, of Pannonian plains and slow rivers, and the Adriatic one, of karst mountains dropping into a sea dotted with more than a thousand islands. The Plitvice lakes, sixteen natural terraced basins joined by waterfalls, form because the water deposits travertine over mosses and algae and the barriers grow a few centimetres each year, a living process still under way. The Velebit range keeps dense forests with brown bear, wolf and lynx, and its slopes fall straight into the Adriatic. Inland, the Kopački rit park, at the confluence of the Drava and the Danube, is one of the largest floodplain wetlands in Europe, with colonies of herons and white-tailed eagles. The Dalmatian coast adds Posidonia meadows, uninhabited islands and a marine fauna that includes resident bottlenose dolphins and loggerhead turtles.