Split is inscribed into the UNESCO World Heritage List, certainly occupies a special position, and the warmth and offer of a modern Mediterranean city. The first detailed tourist guide through the town and its surroundings, published in 1894, bears witness to the long tourist tradition in Split. To be able to grasp the historical significance of the city, one should first visit the museums of Split: the Museum of Croatian Archaeological Monuments - a capital Croatian cultural project, established in 1893 in Knin; the Archaeological Museum from 1820, one of the oldest in Croatia; the Treasury of the Split Cathedral, including a valuable collection of religious art; the Ethnographic Museum, founded in 1910; the Museum of Marine History; the Museum of Natural Science. The Art Gallery, established in 1931, the Collection of the Franciscan Monastery in Poljud, the Mestrovic Gallery, and other are also worth visiting. Split is a major sports centre (the 1979 Mediterranean Games) with many famous and popular sports clubs and competitors. There are also many sports facilities for recreational purposes. The sports offer includes almost all types of water and other sports, from football, basketball and tennis to mountain climbing and rifle-shooting, water skiing and rowing.

In the early Middle Ages the town was built within Diocletian's Palace. Commercial prosperity of the 13th and the 14th centuries spurred a more intense construction; the town spread outside the Palace, and a new centre developed along the western walls of the Palace which was fortified in the 14th century, and in the 17th century a new defence system with projecting bastions, constructed by A. Magli, was erected. Field labourers quarters Veli Varos and Lucac developed to the north and the east of the town, which later merged with the nucleus of the old town into a whole. Between the two World Wars the city expanded over the southern slopes of Marjan and to the eastern part Bacvice, where a modern part of the city was constructed. During the Second World War Split was heavily bombed, particularly the coastal part southeast of the Palace of Diocletian (today's park). Since the 1950s Split has been characterized by a sudden spatial expansion (new blocks, the so-called Split III and other).

The Roman Emperor Diocletian spent his declining years in an enormous palace that he had built near his birthplace, Aspalthos, in Dalmatia. With the passing centuries the original architecture of the palace has been altered, but the people of the city, later called Spalato, and then Split, were able to use the structure of the palace, damaging it as little as possible, under Byzantine, Venetian and Austro-Hungarian rule. Thus, a harmonious city came into being within the Roman walls. The peristyle of the palace, Diocletian's mausoleum, Jupiter's temple, the colonnades along the streets, Early Croatian churches, Romanesque houses, the gates of Andrija Buvina and architectural works by Juraj Dalmatinac have remained in a good state.