Retirement in Split: Is it Safer & Cheaper than Cape Town?

Split looks like an easy yes. Sea, sunshine, old stone streets, ferries to the islands. We are not here to ask if it's good for a holiday. We're asking, could this replace the UK half of our year, spending our summers in Croatia and our winters in Cape Town? Well, our first test was really simple. How does Split feel before you've even unpacked? And straight away we had two major clues: an absolutely stunningly beautiful harbor, yet it was super crowded. Largely due to the number of cruise ships that were in port that day. So we've arrived in Split. We are early to check into our B&B, so we are just having some expensive lunch by the harbour, but it is nice views. And there are 2 cruise ships in today, so there are already a lot of people around. And obviously we'll show you around possibly more later on. This is Get Split apartment 2, right in the center of the Old Town. There's James.

Hello, welcome, welcome to Get Split, booked on booking.com. Uh, nice little place, huge bed, that's very important for us. Yeah, and good night's sleep. And apparently that wall is part of Diocletian's Palace. So it's a Roman era wall.

Wow.

Right smack in the old town. A little kitchenette.

That's good.

And yeah, little bathroom.

Teeny weeny bathroom. Sorry, but perfectly—

small but perfectly formed. And there's a little—

nice big shower.

Yeah, that's nice.

Definitely one of the things that you will need to contend with in Split is the crowds and all the cruise ships that are coming in. This is the reality of Instagram. Look at the queues. You cannot tell me that that ice cream shop is so much better than any others that it's worth coming to, and it's just the Instagrammers who have made these places popular. And you know, to some extent it's good because it helps businesses, but in other respects it's not good. We've watched a few Instagram videos and they are so unrealistic compared to what the reality of Split is like. So hopefully you'll trust what we're telling you more than flipping Instagram videos. This is where Split started to score well. The ferry port, bus station, airport shuttle, taxis, and Old Town are all close together. For retirement travel, that really matters. I guess this is where you can buy all of your, uh, bits—

ferry tickets, and there's bars, liquor, tobacco, cosmetics. See how the little catamarans are here? And all the biggies over there. Shuttle bus that runs from the airport to the old city and to the ferry port. So if you're coming off one of the ferries, you can just jump on this and off you go up to the airport.

And that's probably way, way cheaper than getting a cab. Just so you know, we spent €25 getting from the airport to the city, but total, yeah, total for both of us. But we were also seeing it advertised at €50, so it's really expensive for a 20-minute ride.

If you shop around, booking.com did them for £25 for both of us one way, straight into pretty much as close as possible to where we need to be in the old town. So same, and on the way back we've got a taxi picking us up from outside the ferry port, the catamaran ferry port, take us back, and that was about £25 as well.

So if that's €10 each €20, so yeah, a little bit cheaper, but probably for convenience it's easier to get a cab. Yeah, you probably can't see this, but interestingly enough you can get Uber here, and James has just done a trip to the airport and it's €33, €34, so it is a bit more expensive doing that.

But that could be surge pricing because a lot of big ferries have just come in, so just pre-book where you can, either Booking.com, Aviator, or Get Your Guide, and just have a look around.

Yeah, I mean you could just pick it up on the day, but you don't know what you're going to get or what you're going to charge.

At least you know it's €10 per person if you want to get the bus, so that would be your benchmark. This is where the car ferries go from.

Yeah, you can see all the cars lining up.

You can see all the ones coming off the other ferry that's just come in. Yeah, on the other side.

Time to go exploring the old town.

Okay, that whole side down where you see the arches and the columns all the way down along the river, that's Diocletian's Palace.

It's ironic that we are considering whether Split could be somewhere we could retire because the Diocletian Palace was built 1,700 years ago for the retirement of— is it the emperor?

Emperor Diocletian. That's the cathedral, um, and coming to Diocletian's Palace, and as you can see it's quite busy, loads and loads of people. That's actually from Egypt during the Roman times, was brought here.

And it's really interesting that there's still some Roman soldiers here. Look over there, see their head.

All this is part of the original Black Hall or something, Darkestion's palace.

I shall put some useful information below. But on a lovely summer's evening, it is very nice. We're in the underside of the palace and it's a lot cooler now than it is outside. Oh, you want to find somewhere during the day to cool down, come down here. It's about 10 degrees cooler here. Knoblauch Billy.

So we've just ordered wine, so we're gonna pile through a liter of wine.

Oops, it's the house wine, which isn't too bad.

So we've ordered a farmer's plate for two to share, and we've ordered kebab.

James is quite drunk, everybody.

I'm not quite drunk, I'm only tipsy.

So tell us what the— what that was like.

It was very nice.

Not as nice as a starter, but way too much food, right?

I highly recommend Konoba, really. Food has been really good, service has been good. They seem to hire a certain type of waiter, which is even better.

Good-looking, handsome ones, he means.

Yeah, so pretty much, yeah, handsome, muscly, young, hot thing.

Everybody at James is drunk.

But honestly, the food, no, the food has lived up to it.

So end of day 1, and this time of night is definitely the place and time to be out, isn't it, because it's cooler and the cruise ships have gone.

It's also lovely temperature, just everyone's out walking. Yeah, so as you can see, lovely light.

This is our view from our little seat, except there's a bit of a palm in this part of the—

all the way along the river Shinmazeri.

Ah, these market stalls for as far as you can see. We're off on our next adventure today. What are we doing, James?

We're doing a half-day tour of the Blue Lagoon and, uh, 3 islands, I think it is.

Anyway, we'll take you along with us and let you know what it's like to see whether you think this is something you should do, whether you're thinking of longer stay in Croatia or Split or just visiting for a vacation.

This bay is pretty shallow, like 5 to 6 meters maximum at the entry, even less as we go inside more further. You can see different shades of the blue color everywhere, light blue and a dark blue. That's because of sea grass that's growing under, called Posidonia Océania, and that's endemic species of Adriatic Sea, and it creates these dark blue spots. On the other hand, we have a light blue color. There is only sand down there at the bottom. Sun is reflecting sandy bottom, and it creates beautiful light blue color of the sea, and that's why we call it Rola. The different shades of the blue color.

A big part of the Croatia appeal is access to this beautiful water. If this became a base for us, we would definitely want the sea to be part of our normal life. Not just a special day out, and you indeed see lots of locals swimming in the sea every single morning. So we've just arrived at our last stop on our boat trip in Trogir, and it looks absolutely beautiful. So we're going—

UNESCO World Heritage Site, built in the 4th century by the Greeks apparently.

Yeah, so looks lovely. So we've got an hour here, so we're going to go and have a wander. Apparently the place isn't very big, it's only 500 meters deep, so we should be able to walk around it quite easily. So it's interesting talking to the skipper on the boat. She was saying that Croatia joined the EU in 2013 and joined the euro in 2023, so not very long ago. And she said things since then, two things have happened. One, everything's got way more expensive, which we can contest to because things definitely were more expensive. And second of all, tourism has gone crazy. Obviously when it was part of Yugoslavia there wasn't really much tourism, and since the Game of Thrones was filmed here and obviously got lots of promotion and shows what a beautiful country it is, and also lots of Instagrammers and I guess people like us recording content here has helped increase tourism, and we are just heading into the busy season now. We're filming in middle of June, so things are busy, and they stay busy right the way through July and August, and then quiet down in September and October. She actually said October was the best time to come because it's much quieter. The sea, the sea is still warm because it's obviously absorbed all that heat during the summer, but things are much, much less crazy, so it's much more a place for the locals. So some useful information. You can see why people come here because it is so stunningly beautiful, but already really hot. We're ordering a sandwich from Focaccina, which seems to be a famous place. The sandwiches look amazing, so we are just waiting for ours. Okay, our sandwiches have arrived. I've got a classic one, and James has got a salami. They're just small, so they're normal size.

Thank you.

Huge. Anyway, hopefully they're nice. Public holiday today in Croatia, so we decided to take a walk. We've walked about half an hour from town, never each— west, I think, is that right? And we've come for a swim. And we luckily found some shade. There are quite— there are a few public beaches around here, so you can see over there is a kind of a, uh, what you call it, a platform, yeah, and a beach club type thing where you can probably hire sunbeds. And then over on this side is the public beach, but we've just come to a fairly quiet rocky place with a platform that goes down into the see. And we've been for a swim, haven't we, James? Yeah. What was it like?

It was actually all right. Salty, very salty.

You floated. But it's nice, it's nice here that, um, half an hour walk, there's a little changing booth. We bought some water, shower.

We bought some water on the way, although to be honest, by the shower point you can get, um, fresh water anyway. So even if you have a water bottle with you, you can always just top it up over there.

We've walked a little bit further on, maybe 10 minutes on from where we were swimming. We've got to the public beach, which as you can see in a lot of Croatia is a stony beach. To be honest, this was the first moment Split felt less like a city break and more like a routine. Walk out of town, find shade, swim, rinse off, have lunch, walk back slowly. This is the sort of ordinary day that you'd have on your retirement, and we were testing whether this is a place we could live. So after 3 days, we had enough to answer the first question: Split had definitely passed the holiday test, but had it passed the retirement test? Okay, so we've had our 3 days in Split. Let's just kind of sum up our thoughts about is this a place that we could stay for longer. So what do you think, James? What are the pros and cons?

Ah, pros: beautiful, lots of history, the water's stunning here, so swimming around here has Perfect.

Um, got places to eat, lots of places to drink.

Yeah, so con-wise, busy, very busy. And this is supposed to be quieter than Dubrovnik. I'd hate to see what Dubrovnik feels like, but there's a lot of young people. Obviously it's quite big with clubbing and all that somewhere.

Um, yeah, and I also, I think it's surprisingly expensive. So if you want an aperol, it's going to cost you €10-11. Breakfast is sort of €30 for 2 people, lunch is similar, and dinner anything up to sort of €70 or €80 depending on what you're going to drink. So don't expect it to be a cheap place. We thought it probably would be cheaper than Italy. I think the other con from a longer-term stay is it's hot. So we're here in June and it's in— there is a heatwave though, yeah, it's very humid. Yeah, we're in the— it's in the mid-30s, it's quite humid because it's rained a bit today, and of course it's going to get hotter in July and August as well. So in terms of spending our winters in Cape Town and our summers here, I think we might find this just a little bit too oppressive and too hot. But could we see ourselves spending longer here than, you know, 3 days, maybe a month or 2? Then absolutely, because there's an awful lot of the country to explore that we haven't seen, and there's also the beautiful islands as well. It's definitely a sort of a sea life here, isn't it?

And also you get into more of a rhythm. Yeah, so you kind of wake up at a certain time, go for a coffee, because everyone loves going, sitting, having a chilled coffee. So you don't have to plan your day because you've got a short amount of time. You know you've got a longer period of time, so you just go with the flow. Yeah. Slow down, go for a swim in the morning, come back, do something else, go explore somewhere. So you get more into a rhythm that way.

Yeah, so we're off to Hvar tomorrow, which is Stari Grad, and Stari Grad is the quieter part of the island, right?

It's a quieter town, yeah, one of the oldest inhabited.

So we're, yeah, so we're going to be seeing, is that a place that we could retire with? And that will be in next Sunday's video, so Make sure you join us then to see what spending time on a smaller island is going to be like. And if you found today's video useful, please give us the like, hit the like button, and make sure you hit subscribe. Doesn't cost you anything, but it helps the algorithm show our videos to more people just like you. So other than that, this is James and Rob saying goodbye for now, and we will see you next Sunday in Hvar.

Hurrah! Hvala!