2 Best Sights in Zagreb and Environs, Croatia

Built in the16th century, this tower is the only part of Varaždin's northern town wall that has been preserved. The wall formed part of the onetime city fortress, but most of it was razed in the early 19th century. It's from this spot that Ban Josip Jelačić (to whom Zagreb's main square is also dedicated) led 50,000 soldiers across the Drava in 1848, taking back Croatia's northernmost region of Međimurje from the Hungarian Kingdom. In 2022, during work on the tower, archaeological ruins of the ancient defense system around Varaždin were discovered.

Čakovec's main square, Trg Republike, is a pretty Baroque affair, with a major highlight being the Trgovački Kasino. It's odd that the key gathering place of the town's early-20th-century bourgeois class should have survived the Communist era intact, but here it has stood since 1903, wearing its Hungarian art nouveau style very much on its sleeve: red brick interspersed with a white stucco background, squares and circles across the bottom, and curved lines formed by the brickwork working their way to the top. Back in its heyday, this was more than a casino in the gambling sense of the word: besides a card room and a game parlor, it housed a ladies' salon, a reading room, and a dance hall. The building was mostly a trade-union headquarters in the post–World War II era, and its interior is still off-limits to the public. To explore a bit further, just off Trg Republike is Trg Kralja Tomislava, the town's major pedestrian shopping street.