Croatia (Eyewitness Travel Guides)

Leandro Zoppe

1 Warning This Guide is Rubbish.
We have just used this guide on our annual family holiday to Croatia. It is expensive, out-of-date, and worse, its coverage of the subject of 'Where to Stay' is misleading in the extrem. important information is completely missing.

Get yourself a copy of the Rough Guide, owned by the same publishing conglomerate Viking Penguin. Apparently the author cannot even do a cut and paste job from a stable mate book!

Or dump the lot and use LONELY PLANET CROATIA, that's my best advice.

To the publishers DK, I say PRETTY PICTURES ARE NOT ENOUGH.

2 pretty but often of little use
I think the title of my review wraps it all up: the eyewitness guides are a work of graphic art. Their highlight is probably the great work on the maps, both small and large scale, which are of great help as you navigate around the city looking for the hot spots. As a tool for reaching all of the sights you want to see, I would say that the Eyewitness Guide is among the best, with its close-up street maps, neighborhood maps and public transportation guides. In addition to this, as another positive comment I would say that it is a great guide to take on a trip if you don't have much time and you need information presented in an easy-to-read, simple manner. The drawings and photos, and the way they are laid out, is very appealing.

The advantages stop there, however. If you really want to get to know a city, town or island, you simply need more in-depth historical and cultural information on the sights you are seeing. Most of the descriptions of places in the Eyewitness Guide for Croatia do not stretch beyond a paragraph or two, which is quite superficial in my opinion. If you really want to know about the history behind the church, monument, museum or park you have traveled so far to see, you will definitely need another guidebook to give you any kind of detail. This flaw becomes far worse when you read the sections on sights that are off the beaten track (which are many!). The descriptions become utterly superficial, with sometimes no more than a sentence dedicated to a whole island.

Harsh critique also for the hotel and restaurant information, which is limited to places designed for the rich and famous, or at least the very upper of the upper-middle class. The best guides give you a little information on all styles of lodging and food, from low budget to luxury, but these guides make little effort to do so, and even the information on the laps of luxury is limited to little symbols, instead of providing descriptions like other guides do.

With this combination of characteristics, I think Eyewitness is good to take along for a short trip in which you have little time to spend seeing the city and you don't really care about getting any deep information on what you're seeing. Otherwise, keep looking for another guidebook.

3 Great niche book to bring to Croatia
If you understand the type of guides published by Eyewitness, you will be real happy with this purchase. As a future traveler to Croatia, I needed a book to help me with where to stay, where to eat and where to go for nightlife. For that, I looked to the Rough Guide Croatia (search on 1858285445) and Lonely Planet Croatia (search on 1864503327). These books have lots of text and lots of information! However, when I wanted a guide that explains the history of Croatia, detailed information on each sight that I'm visiting, and great pictures to boot, that's when I picked up this book. It does have a restaurant and accomodation section, but it's pretty small. I wouldn't rely solely on this book to plan your stay in Croatia...

Croatia: Travels in Undiscovered Country