The city's beach, its rowing course and its summer nightlife, all on one artificial lake by the Sava.
Zagreb is 130 kilometres from the sea and it minds. Jarun — often called Zagrebačko more, the Zagreb sea — is what it built instead.
The lake was excavated from the Sava’s old gravel flood plain and completed for the 1987 Summer Universiade, the World Student Games, which Zagreb hosted and which left the city with a good deal of its sports infrastructure.
What it is for
The regatta course. The main basin is a full 2,000-metre rowing course with lanes and a finishing tower, and it is in constant use by clubs and for international competition.
Swimming. There are gravel and grass beaches on the smaller basins, with lifeguards in season, changing facilities and a marked swimming area. The water is regularly tested and posted.
The circuit. A path of just over six kilometres runs the whole way round, and it is the city’s running and cycling route. Also inline skating, which remains genuinely popular here in a way it is not elsewhere.
Everything else: basketball courts, volleyball on sand, football pitches, a skate park, rowing and kayak hire, and a great many benches.
The nightlife
The southern shore has a strip of clubs and bars — Aquarius being the long-standing name — that made Jarun the centre of Zagreb’s summer nightlife from the nineties onwards.
It is not what it was. Several venues have closed or moved, and the scene has partly relocated to the city centre and to festival sites. But on a hot Friday in July it is still where a large part of the city under thirty ends up.
INmusic Festival, one of the larger festivals in this part of Europe, is held on the island in the lake each June.
The honest bit
It is an artificial lake beside a motorway-scale road on the edge of a city, and it looks like one. There is no drama to the setting.
What it has is use. On a summer weekend Jarun is packed with people swimming, rowing, running, drinking coffee and sitting on the grass, and watching a city enjoy a place it built for itself is a better hour than most sights offer.
Out of season it is quiet, grey and rather beautiful in a flat Central European way.
Practical
Free, always open.
Tram 5 or 17 from the centre, about fifteen minutes.
Bring your own food and drink if you are staying — the kiosks are adequate rather than good.
Bundek, a smaller lake in Novi Zagreb across the river, is the quieter alternative and is closer to the Museum of Contemporary Art.
