Dental Tourism – Croatia
Croatia, officially the Republic of, is a sovereign state between Central Europe, Southeast Europe, and the Mediterranean. Its capital city is Zagreb, which forms one of the country's primary subdivisions, along with
Dental Tourism – Croatia
Croatia, officially the Republic of, is a sovereign state between Central Europe, Southeast Europe, and the Mediterranean. Its capital city is Zagreb, which forms one of the country's primary subdivisions, along with its twenty counties. Croatia covers 56,594 square kilometers (21,851 square miles) and has diverse, mostly continental and Mediterranean climates. Croatia's Adriatic Sea coast contains more than a thousand islands. The country's population is 4.28 million, most of whom are Croats, with the most common religious denomination being Roman Catholicism.
A unitary state, Croatia is a republic governed under a parliamentary system. The International Monetary Fund classified Croatia as an emerging and developing economy, and the World Bank identified it as a high-income economy.
Since 2000, the Croatian government constantly invests in infrastructure, especially transport routes and facilities along the Pan-European corridors. Internal sources produce a significant portion of energy in Croatia; the rest is imported.
Most of Croatia has a moderately warm and rainy continental climate as defined by the Köppen climate classification. Mean monthly temperature ranges between −3 °C (27 °F) (in January) and 18 °C (64 °F) (in July). Mean annual precipitation ranges between 600 millimeters (24 inches) and 3,500 millimeters (140 inches) depending on geographic region and prevailing climate type. Prevailing winds in the interior are light to moderate northeast or southwest, and in the coastal area prevailing winds are determined by local area features. Higher wind velocities are more often recorded in cooler months along the coast. The sunniest parts of the country are the outer islands, Hvar and Korčula, where more than 2700 hours of sunshine are recorded per year.
Croatia is inhabited mostly by Croats (90.4%) and is ethnically the most homogeneous of the six countries of former Yugoslavia. Minority groups include Serbs (4.4%), Bosniaks, Hungarians, Italians, Slovenes, Germans, Czechs, Romani people and others (5.9%).
Croatia has no official religion. Freedom of religion is a right defined by the Constitution which also defines all religious communities as equal in front of the law and separated from the state. According to the 2011 census, 91.36% of Croatians identify as Christian; of these, Roman Catholics make up the largest group, accounting for 86.28% of the population, after which follows Eastern Orthodoxy (4.44%), Protestantism (0.34%) and other Christianity (0.30%). Second largest religion is Islam (1.47%). 4.57% of the population describes themselves as non-religious.
Croatian is the official language of Croatia, and became the 24th official language of the European Union upon its accession in 2013. Minority languages are in official use in local government units where more than a third of population consists of national minorities or where local legislation defines so. Those languages are Czech, Hungarian, Italian, Ruthenian, Serbian and Slovakian.
Croatia has a universal health care system, whose roots can be traced back to the Hungarian-Croatian Parliament Act of 1891, providing a form of mandatory insurance of all factory workers and craftsmen. The population is covered by a basic health insurance plan provided by statute and optional insurance. There are hundreds of healthcare institutions in Croatia, including 79 hospitals and clinics with 23,967 beds. The hospitals and clinics care for more than 700 thousand patients per year and employ 5,205 medical doctors, including 3,929 specialists. There are 6,379 private practice offices, and a total of 41,271 health workers in the country. There are 63 emergency medical service units, responding to more than a million calls.
Literacy in Croatia stands at 99.2%. A worldwide study about the quality of living in different countries published by Newsweek in August 2010 ranked the Croatian education system at 22nd, to share the position with Austria. Croatia has also produced inventors and two Croatians received the Nobel Prize.
Croatia is well-covered with mobile networks and you will be able to communicate easily in huge majority of its territory. Croatia has three mobile carriers - Hrvatski Telekom (Croatian Telecom), VIPnet and Tele2. Hrvatski Telekom and VIPnet each own two operators, while Tele2 owns one operator.
Roaming charges in Croatia went down significantly since accession to the EU in July 2013. Prices for tourists from EU/EEA countries are now capped by European Union, which means they are a few times lower than they used to be. If you plan to stay longer and want to buy a Croatian mobile phone number (SIM card), you can do it in thousands of stores - from operators' and their partners' stores, to technical equipment shops, supermarkets and newsstands. Topping-up an account is even easier, since vouchers can be bought almost everywhere.
If you will need a landline, you shouldn't have a problem with locating one. Most of the households own a fixed-line phone and many hosts won't mind you to use it if you're staying in their property. Of course, one expects you to compensate the cost, especially if you dial a number abroad. If you need to call a number inside of Croatia, some hosts might not charge you anything, since most of the fixed-line packages now have flat-packages, that include a certain (or even 'unlimited') number of free minutes.
In recent years, Croatia got many free public hotspots. Hundreds of public lo