Istria, Kvarner & Plitvice

Istria takes its name from the Histri, an Illyrian people whose hill-forts dotted the peninsula until Rome stormed their capital, Nesactium, in 177 BC; the Liburnians held the Kvarner coast and the Iapodes the Lika highlands. Rome made Pola a colony with an amphitheatre, temples and a triumphal arch, and under Byzantine rule in the 6th century Bishop Euphrasius built the mosaic-lined basilica at Poreč. From the 13th century Venice took the Istrian coast town by town — Poreč in 1267, Rovinj in 1283, Pula in 1331 — while the interior around Pazin passed to the Habsburgs in 1374, a division that lasted until Venice fell in 1797.

Kvarner followed a different course. The Frankopan counts ruled Krk until Venice seized it in 1480, and the island's Baška tablet, carved around 1100, is among the oldest texts in Croatian. Senj was the base of the Uskoks, refugee fighters who raided Ottoman and Venetian shipping from beneath Nehaj fortress, built in 1558, until a war between Venice and Austria ended with their removal in 1617. Lika, where the Croatian nobility was cut down at Krbava Field in 1493, was Ottoman from the 1520s to the late 17th century and then part of the Habsburg Military Frontier until 1881. Rijeka became a free port in 1719 and Hungary's outlet to the sea from 1779; Pula became Austria's main naval base; and Opatija, once the railway arrived in 1873, became the empire's winter riviera.

The 20th century was hard on the region. Gabriele D'Annunzio seized Rijeka in 1919 and Italy annexed it in 1924, having held Istria since 1918; two decades of forced Italianisation were followed after 1945 by Yugoslav rule, reprisal killings and the departure of most Italian speakers. Tito received Nehru and Nasser on Brijuni in 1956 and held political prisoners on Goli Otok. The Croatian war's first deaths came at Plitvice on Easter Sunday 1991, and the park and eastern Lika stayed in rebel Serb hands until August 1995.

No part of Croatia is less uniform. Istria is officially bilingual: street signs are in Croatian and Italian, an Italian minority remains in Rovinj and other towns, and many residents call themselves Istrian before anything else, a regionalism that has kept the peninsula voting for its own party since the 1990s and that prizes convivenza, living together. Older tongues survive at the edges: Istriot, a Romance language, in a few southern towns, and Istro-Romanian in the villages of Žejane and Šušnjevica. The coast and islands speak Čakavian dialects, Lika the Štokavian of the interior.

Krk and inner Istria were strongholds of Glagolitic, the angular Slavic script used in church books here for centuries; a sculpture trail, the Glagolitic Alley, runs seven kilometres from Roč to Hum, which bills itself as the smallest town in the world. Istria's two-part singing in its own narrow scale, accompanied by the reedy sopele and the mih bagpipe, is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list, as are the zvončari of the Kastav area above Rijeka — men in sheepskins and animal-head masks who march from village to village at carnival, clanging bells to drive out winter. Rijeka's carnival parade is the biggest in the country, and the morčić, a jewel in the form of a black, turbaned Moor's head, is one of the city's best-known symbols.

Rijeka has a port city's temper: industrial, left-leaning, tolerant, proud of its rock and punk bands and of its year as European Capital of Culture in 2020. Pilgrims climb the 561 steps to the shrine of Our Lady of Trsat, Pula has shown films in its Roman arena each summer since 1954, Rab re-enacts its medieval fair, the Rapska Fjera, each summer, and Lika keeps the red-topped lička kapa cap for feast days and a highlander's reputation for stubbornness and hospitality.

Rijeka, with about 108,000 people, is Croatia's third city and its main port; Pula, with some 52,000, is the largest town in Istria, though the county seat is inland at Pazin. After them come Poreč, Rovinj, Umag, Labin and Opatija, each with between 10,000 and 17,000 residents, and the island towns of Krk and Mali Lošinj. Istria County has about 195,000 inhabitants and Primorje-Gorski Kotar about 265,000; Lika-Senj, the largest county in Croatia by area, has barely 43,000, fewer than any other, and its seat, Gospić, is a town of about 6,000.

Tourism dominates. Istria is one of the country's busiest tourist regions, with most visitors staying in campsites, resorts and rented apartments between Umag and Medulin, and the coastal year divides into a frantic season from June to September and a quiet winter when many restaurants close. Behind the beaches there is other work: olive groves, vineyards and truffle-hunting in inner Istria; the port, a shipyard, an oil refinery and a university in Rijeka; a gas terminal at Omišalj on Krk; forestry and sawmills in Gorski Kotar; sheep, potatoes and park jobs in Lika. Pula's Uljanik shipyard, founded in 1856, went bankrupt in 2019.

The worries are those of a successful holiday coast — apartment blocks spreading along the shore, house prices beyond local wages, water and roads under strain in August — and, inland, the opposite. Lika and Gorski Kotar have been losing people for a century, a loss deepened in Lika by the war, and many villages are down to a handful of elderly residents. Plitvice, which receives well over a million visitors a year, now limits visitors by entry hour to manage crowding.

Istrian cooking is the country's most Italianate. Home-made pasta such as fuži comes with truffles, and maneštra is a thick soup of beans, potatoes and other vegetables. White and black truffles grow in the moist Motovun forest of the Mirna valley. Istrian pršut is cured skinless with salt, pepper and garlic and dried by the bura rather than smoked, and boškarin is the native Istrian breed of cattle. The wines are Malvazija, a fresh white, the sharp red Teran and the muscat of Momjan, and the brandies biska, flavoured with mistletoe, and honeyed medenica.

Seafood leads on the Kvarner coast, where scampi are cooked na buzaru, a style shared with Istria. Krk makes the white Žlahtina of Vrbnik; Rab has its spiral almond-and-maraschino Rapska torta; and Lovran celebrates its large sweet chestnuts, maruni, each October.

Over the mountains the food turns highland. Gorski Kotar cooks game, wild mushrooms and forest berries; Lika is known for lamb roasted on the spit, potatoes — lički krumpir has protected status — sauerkraut with smoked meat, škripavac, a fresh cheese that squeaks between the teeth, the soft spread basa and plum šljivovica, with Velebitsko beer from a small brewery near Gospić.

Pula's amphitheatre, the Arena, stands above the harbour with its outer wall intact, the Temple of Augustus and the Arch of the Sergii a short walk away; off Fažana lie the Brijuni islands, a national park of Roman ruins, dinosaur footprints and Tito's safari park, and at the peninsula's tip the coves of Cape Kamenjak. Rovinj crowds a former island beneath the bell tower of St Euphemia, with the Lim channel, a ten-kilometre drowned valley, to the north, and Poreč's Euphrasian Basilica, a World Heritage Site, glitters with 6th-century mosaics. Inland, Motovun rides its hill above the Mirna, its ramparts walkable; Grožnjan is given over to artists, and the Pazin chasm beneath the castle gave Jules Verne a plot. The Parenzana, a disused narrow-gauge railway, is now a cycle trail through the hill towns.

Rijeka has the Korzo promenade, the baroque City Tower, the market halls by the harbour and Trsat Castle above the Rječina gorge. Opatija, 18 kilometres north-west, keeps its Habsburg villas, the park of the Villa Angiolina and the Lungomare seafront path. The island of Krk, reached by bridge, has a walled capital with a Frankopan castle, Vrbnik on its cliff, the monastery islet of Košljun and the long pebble beach at Baška. Ferries go on to Cres, home to endangered griffon vultures, to Lošinj, off which the bronze Apoxyomenos was found on the seabed in 1996, and to Rab, with its four bell towers. Behind the coast, Risnjak National Park shelters lynx, bear and wolf in the forests of Gorski Kotar.

Plitvice Lakes, a World Heritage Site since 1979, are sixteen lakes stepping down a wooded valley over travertine barriers that the water itself builds, linked by boardwalks, electric boats and the 78-metre Veliki slap. West of them lie the Gacka valley's trout streams, Tesla's birthplace at Smiljan, Senj's Nehaj fortress and Northern Velebit National Park, where the 57-kilometre Premužić trail sets out along the ridge.