Biokovo

Biokovo had been visible from our balcony the entire time we stayed in Makarska, this grey wall of mountain looming behind the town, and by day three curiosity won out over laziness. We rented a car and drove the switchback road up into the nature park, which climbs so fast and so steeply that the temperature actually dropped a good ten degrees in twenty minutes, and the Adriatic below shrank into a flat blue sheet with Makarska looking like a toy town pressed against the coast.

The road itself was reason enough for the trip — narrow, unguarded in places, hairpin after hairpin cut into bare rock, with pull-offs every so often where everyone stops for photos because the view genuinely earns the cliché. But the actual destination was the Biokovo Skywalk, a horseshoe-shaped glass platform that juts out from the cliff edge at around 1,200 meters, with nothing but glass and air between you and the sea a kilometer straight down. I’m not usually bothered by heights and this one still got me — that first step onto the glass sent a genuine jolt through my knees, and Lia, who has zero fear of heights, still grabbed my arm.

Once my legs stopped feeling weird, the view was ridiculous — the whole Makarska Riviera laid out below, Brač and Hvar floating on the water in the distance, and behind us the barren, almost lunar interior of the mountain itself, all pale rock and scattered scrub with none of the greenery you’d expect from a mountain this close to the sea. We walked a short trail beyond the skywalk toward the summit area, Sveti Jure, though we didn’t push all the way to the top chapel and radar station — the wind up there picks up fast and hard, and I wasn’t in the mood to be blown off a mountain.

On the way down we stopped at a small botanical garden within the park, an odd little pocket of terraced greenery that some enthusiast planted decades ago among all that bare karst, and it felt almost jarring after the starkness above. We were back in Makarska in time for a swim before dinner, and I kept looking up at the mountain from the beach afterward, slightly disbelieving that we’d been standing on a glass platform a kilometer above where I was now floating in warm water.

When to go: Late spring or early autumn for clear skies and manageable heat on the drive up; summer afternoons often bring haze that dulls the island views from the skywalk.