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Choosing the Right Tent for Camping Holiday in Croatia

The most popular tent people use nowadays for their summer camping holidays along the Croatian coast or on the Croatian Islands is the so-called “dome tent”.

Dome tent comes in a variety of designs: the hoop tents (with curved poles forming the tunnel), the pop-up tents (good for those who don’t like using pegs, poles, and ropes), or the cabins – (larger tents that make some kind of small house – with separate spaces for living in and sleeping).

As most of the dome tents are pretty lightweight, they are very popular among people without their own transport or who go backpacking.

The dome tent is also very easy to erect – all you have to do is to connect flexible poles crossing the top of the tent to support the fabric and the tent is almost ready to use. In some cases, you don’t even have to use pegs to keep the tent erected as flexible poles support the fabric well enough.

Some dome tents don’t even have an external waterproof sheet, which makes them even lighter and easier to carry around.

From my experience, these kinds of tents are fine if there is no wind and if it is not raining. However, in case of rain, all kind of dome tent gets soaking wet sooner or later and in case of stronger wind, they get unstable.

Although summers in Croatia are mostly dry, from time to time, storms with strong winds and heavy rain (locally called “nevera”) come quickly and unexpectedly in which case dome tent is simply just not good enough.

Therefore if possible, I would always suggest you use a good, old-fashioned A-frame tent.

The A-frame tent has a triangular shape, the canvas is supported by three poles – two poles on each end and a longer one running along the rooftop connecting two side poles together. The whole structure is additionally supported by a strong, external waterproof flysheet, strengthened by rows of pegs and ropes that are well strained.

The A-frame tent is heavier to carry around. Due to the location of two side poles, in comparison to similar size dome tents, A-frame tent has less space.

However, an A-frame tent is much more stable and reliable in case of bad weather – when you hide inside and hope to keep yourself and your possessions dry.

Anyhow, when on summer holiday we spend most of our time outdoors (swimming, sunbathing…) not inside of a tent, so, in my opinion, space is not as crucial as reliability in case of extreme weather.