Islands — some 1,200 of them — dot the Adriatic coast of Croatia like a long line of bread crumbs, ranging from two-acre specks to 35-mile-long spines of rock and scrub.
Beautiful and remote, the labyrinth stretches for several hundred miles, from the northern coastal town of Rijeka past the walled city of Dubrovnik.
In the 19th century, the Austro-Hungarians and their monarch Franz Joseph, then rulers of the Adriatic, vowed to make the seas around these islands safer by building 48 sturdy lighthouses.
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