Eight squares and parks laid out in a U around the lower town, and the best free walk in the city.
When Zagreb rebuilt itself after the 1880 earthquake, the city engineer Milan Lenuci laid out the new lower town around a U-shaped chain of squares and parks, open at the top towards the old hills.
It is one of the best pieces of nineteenth-century urban planning in central Europe, it is entirely free, and most visitors walk across a corner of it without realising it is a single designed object.
The eastern arm
Zrinjevac — properly Trg Nikole Šubića Zrinskog — is the first and the best. Plane trees, a music pavilion of 1891, a meteorological column, and busts of Croatian worthies down the middle. It is where Zagreb goes to sit.
Strossmayer Square, with the Strossmayer Gallery of Old Masters in the Croatian Academy building and a seated bronze of Bishop Strossmayer by Meštrović behind it. The gallery holds Italian, Flemish and Dutch painting given to the nation in 1884, and it also holds the Baška Tablet — one of the oldest surviving monuments of the Croatian language, carved around 1100.
King Tomislav Square, in front of the main railway station, with the equestrian statue and the Art Pavilion — a yellow Secession exhibition hall of 1898, which was originally built for the Budapest millennium exhibition and shipped here in pieces.
The bottom and the western arm
The Botanical Garden of the university, opened in 1889 — five hectares, ten thousand species, an ornamental lake, and free entry. It closes over winter.
Then north up Marulić Square, Mažuranić Square and Marshal Tito Square — now formally Republic of Croatia Square, a renaming that took years and a great deal of argument — where the Croatian National Theatre and Meštrović’s Well of Life stand.
Finally Roosevelt Square with the Mimara.
Walking it
The full circuit is about three kilometres and takes ninety minutes at a stroll, more if you stop.
It is flat, paved, shaded in summer, and lined with benches. It is also the best introduction to what nineteenth-century Zagreb was trying to be: a Habsburg provincial capital determined not to look provincial.
Zrinjevac in December is the centre of Advent and the single most photographed place in the country for about a month.
Zrinjevac in June, when the plane trees are in full leaf and the pavilion has a brass band in it on a Sunday morning, is better and nobody photographs it at all.
