June the 3rd, 2025 – Karlovac tourism is performing well when it comes to continental Croatian tourism, but there’s room for improvement.
As KAportal writes, a deeper look into how tourism is faring in continental Croatian towns and cities has drawn some comparisons from location to location.
It turns out that it’s quite difficult to compare ordinary medium-sized cities (which are, most often, county centres) with spas, national parks or places located directly next to them. Rakovica in the wider Karlovac area is the continental tourist record holder with the exclusion of Zagreb. It has racked up more overnight stays than most Croatian counties combined.
On such a scale of fifteen continental county centres, Zagreb also stands out incomparably, which is quite understandable for a number of reasons. It achieved an impressive 2,646,443 overnight stays in 2024, but being the capital, it falls into a different category than other county centres, towns and cities across the continental part of the country.
Of the other cities, Karlovac is in fourth place when it comes to tourism with an encouraging 71,706 overnight stays recorded. This is generally a very good result in this category, although there is undoubtedly room for improvement. Ahead of Karlovac tourism numbers are those in Osijek with 157,599 overnight stays, Varaždin with 81,186 and Vukovar with 80,201 overnight stays realised.
After Karlovac, there’s a fairly large “gap”, meaning that the next on the list is Slavonski Brod with significantly fewer – 46,498 overnight stays. Gospić could also be in that position with 49,184 overnight stays realised.
Samobor, nestled conveniently between Zagreb and the Slovenian border, came seventh place. It perhaps has an unexpectedly low number of overnight stays realised (36,352 – Zagreb County doesn’t have a separate administrative centre, but Samobor was checked as it is certainly the most touristic place in it). Then came quaint little Čakovec in eighth place. It stands out somewhat in terms of the number of overnight stays achieved (31,046).
At the bottom of the list are four county centres with rather meagre, but similar results – Krapina (19,965), Bjelovar (19,499), Požega (18,292) and Sisak (17,489). Very far behind them in the penultimate place is Koprivnica with 12,867 overnight stays achieved. Further behind still is Virovitica, which recorded only 4,517 overnight stays throughout all of last year.
The promising Karlovac tourism results can be considered good, but there is undoubtedly room for further improvement. Admittedly, the city’s position itself can be viewed in two ways from this perspective, as it inevitably generates overnight stays in transit tourism, but at the same time it also enables numerous one-day trips for which overnight stays are not necessary due to the proximity of Karlovac to Zagreb and Rijeka as larger centres. The same can be said for the likes of the Plitvice Lakes National Park.
