15 August 2021 - Poco Loco Cocktail & Tapas Bar is no longer a new name in Dubrovnik's hospitality scene. This bar-turned-restaurant has occupied the central location of Buniceva Poljana Square for quite some time now. This square in the heart of the city's historical centre is a popular nightspot. It sits behind the Cathedral of the Assumption of Mary and is a hit with locals and foreigners alike.

Dubrovnik is not a young destination. This city has been a travel hotspot for decades and an important port for international travellers for centuries. With this in mind, the offer of local restaurants and bars is quite substantial. However, the sheer number of hospitality businesses does not always automatically mean there is enough diversity on offer. When it comes to the wine and dine scene of the city, most of it is divided between more or less serious restaurants and generic bars featuring rather uniform drinks lists. Thankfully, the winds of change are blowing, and we see fresh ideas slowly but surely taking centre stage. Poco Loco Cocktail & Tapas Bar is a great example.

New Restaurant to Watch in Dubrovnik

Poco Loco has been a popular bar and a less than popular restaurant, but it entered 2021 thoroughly different with brand new management. As a result, it is now one of the city's most interesting wine and dine locations. Under the watchful eye of the manager, Marin Nanić, who amassed quite an impressive experience in the fields of hospitality and tourism, Poco Loco is sure to please even the most discerning customers. Fresh forces in the kitchen came out with an exciting menu featuring a mix of international and local favourites. The food offer is perfect for those looking to grab a quick bite on the fly, as well as those looking to enjoy a slow dinner in one of the city's most vibrant corners.

Food and Drinks at Poco Loco

Guests can enjoy a wide range of tapas-like starters. For example, Viska Pogaca, bread with sautéed anchovies and tomato, is a traditional dish of Vis Island. It is absolutely delicious but difficult to find in local restaurants in Dubrovnik. Octopus ragout is one of their specialities for main dishes and provides a great follow-up. Fresh, locally sourced ingredients and simple recipes produce dishes that are delicious, colourful and textured. Dishes are selected to offer as much freshness and diversity as the setting itself. With this in mind, it would be hard to decide if the show's real star at Poco Loco is the food or the drinks on offer.

You will not go wrong with a lovely selection of Croatian wines from various regions that make up the wine list. There are some wonderful examples offered per glass, so you don't have to worry about food pairing that can be quite limited if you order a bottle to share. However, Poco Loco's cocktails are something special. The cocktail list perfectly sums up the philosophy behind this restaurant and bar. It is imaginative and energetic. It offers plenty for those looking for some all-time favourites but rewards handsomely those willing to try new things (think: The Black Jack). Do not miss enjoying a refreshing cocktail at Poco Loco, either as an aperitif or an after-dinner drink.

Don’t Miss It

With its delicious and interesting food, creative drinks list and location known as one of the most entertaining spots in the city, Poco Loco Cocktail & Tapas Bar should be on your radar regardless of whether you are going out as a couple or a group of friends. Poco Loco is a perfect choice for those wishing to experience Dubrovnik's zest for life. It is a place that will give you plenty of energy and will want only your curiosity in return. So plan your visit at the start of your Dubrovnik holiday as you will surely want to come back.

For all information on Dubrovnik you might need, check out Dubrovnik in a Page on our Total Croatia website.

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ZAGREB, 15 Aug, 2021 - In the past 24 hours, 298 coronavirus cases, out of 8,015 tests, and one death has been confirmed in Croatia, the national COVID-19 crisis management team said on Sunday.

There are 1,903 active cases and 193 hospitalised patients, including 21 on ventilators, while 5,194 persons are self-isolating.

Croatia has logged 367,022 coronavirus cases to date, including 8,283 deaths and 356,836 patients who have recovered, of which 176 in the past 24 hours.

To date, Croatia has vaccinated 41.4% of the population, including 49.7% of adults, 45.95% of whom have been fully vaccinated.

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ZAGREB, 15 Aug, 2021 - President Zoran Milanović on Saturday attended a meeting of the Jelsa Municipal Council on Hvar island on the occasion of the municipality's day, as did Health Minister Vili Beroš as Prime Minister Andrej Plenković's envoy.

Beroš said at the meeting that the tourism results were brilliant owing to the national COVID crisis management team's thinking as well as everyone who complied with the restrictions.

He called for caution "because we don't know what the situation will be like in the autumn," adding that vaccination was the only way out of the crisis.

He said 49.7% of the adult population was vaccinated and that those who were not "represent a reservoir of a possible continuation of new coronavirus variants."

"We are still in the orange (COVID zone), but our position on the ECDC list is unstable. The rising numbers warn that the virus is among us and this position on the list could deteriorate. That won't end the tourist season, but if the epidemic flares up, it could disrupt health plans and plans for the post-season."

Beroš went on to say that big reforms were expected in the health sector, that the system was burdened with many problems, and that the COVID crisis had highlighted all that was good in the system as well as many negative things.

Commenting on Beroš's speech, Milanović said that "we have been living in abnormal circumstances for a year already, on the brink of encroaching upon human freedoms, which requires firm, clear justifications understandable to everyone."

"For now we are holding on and what I see as the most endangered is people's mental health. This will pass. I support the minister and I support any reasonable and persistent policy whose goal is good. So, get vaccinated and most of the problems will be solved," he said.

The president said prejudices were not smart, either about science or something based on proof, research and the trial and error method in which, he added, success was guaranteed and errors  were minor or reduced to the statistical minimum.

"What has been developed in the past year and a half is one of the greatest triumphs in the history of human knowledge, human organisation and synergy. It's an example of synergy, intelligence and money in a short time. Let's get vaccinated!"

Speaking on the occasion of Jelsa Municipality Day, the president said the people of Jelsa were developing their municipality well and in harmony.

He added that every society and politics must start from people's right and possibility to organise into everything that was not subversive or destructive.

Milanović said "we owe loyalty to the Croatian state, which is our national, civic state. It has its territory, its borders, open, human... it has its customs, its history, it also has its prejudices."

He supported everyone who fought for Croatia having such a status in Europe because, he said, the EU was not what had been conceived many years ago, but it was good. "In that world, we are fighting for our interest."

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ZAGREB, 15 Aug, 2021 - Croatian Air Force fire-fighting planes on Sunday managed to contain three wildfires in the Široki Brijeg area, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where they were sent at the country's request, while many fire sites are still active in the Mostar and Jablanica areas.

The fires in the Široki Brijeg area are being put out by fire-fighters and the local population.

The planes took off this morning from Zemunik air base near Zadar, taking water from a lake near Tomislavgrad, BiH.

The request for sending them came on Saturday from the authorities of the Western Herzegovina and Herzegovina-Neretva cantons.

Most fires in Herzegovina are difficult to put out due to the mountainous terrain.

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August 15, 2021 - What happens if you're a tourist that tests positive in Split? A look at Split COVID-19 quarantine through the eyes of Split-Dalmatia County quarantine coordinator Andrej Kovač. 

"What does the life of a quarantined tourist look like? Of course, you can't go anywhere but the room, but you get some unplanned extra rest. They are left groceries on a table in the hallway and receive a knock on the room door. We go out, take what they need and bring it back inside. For ten days."

Andrej Kovač, the coordinator of all Split-Dalmatia County quarantines, appointed by the County Headquarters, describes the life of foreigners who ended up in isolation in a Split hotel after testing positive for coronavirus. The first of two county addresses is reserved for tourists who test positive; the second is located in a small town a few kilometers away from Split, reports Slobodna Dalmacija.

That the coordination between Split's Civil Protection HQ and the Red Cross works great was confirmed recently by a Split landlady, whose two guests tested positive just before returning home to Great Britain, which is why they ended up in quarantine in Split at the price of a bed and breakfast - 45 euros. It was not easy for them at first, nor for other tourists in the same conundrum, but they accepted the situation. What must be done, must be done, says Kovač.

"Of course, there is no beach, but they sunbathe on the balcony. They surf the internet, watch TV, read ... They are satisfied. We definitely want to make it easy for them, so we are at their service for everything they need. Many of them order meals through delivery services, which are delivered to reception, and we pick up the orders and carry them to their rooms. They pay with cards; everything is contactless. Do they have any requests? Um, they'd love to drink alcohol, but we can't let them. But that’s perfectly normal; people want to relax a little bit. When they come out, everyone is happy and content; they don’t create problems. They are decent people; they want to do it as soon as possible and go home," adds the coordinator. 

A young German tourist even told Kovač that he would definitely return regardless of this inconvenience because Split and Split-Dalmatia County are in his heart. He has been spending his summers in the area for years and does not want to give up his favorite holiday destination at any cost.

Another young fan of the Adriatic tested positive before returning home from vacation. Positive test results are often found at the airport, just an hour before the planned departure from Croatia. Among the infected foreigners, however, are those who have just arrived in the country.

"Our biggest problem is people who go home. The fact is that some tourists entered our country positive, even though they were vaccinated or previously infected, so they had European COVID passports and entered Croatia with them. It is also a fact that certain hotels, for the sake of their image and safety, test their guests upon arrival, and it happens that some of them come positive. That was the case with two Americans, for example. They entered the country not knowing they were positive, although they also had a negative test, which is valid for 48 hours. In the end, they ended up with us. And they are delighted with our service and coordination. They do what they have to do, and you can imagine how they feel. They planned a vacation, complied with everything that was needed, and in the end, they ended up in a ten-day quarantine and have additional costs," Andrej Kovač reveals. 

According to Split quarantine records, most infected tourists come from Great Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain.

"The French en masse, and there were a few Germans. And they all had COVID certificates with which they entered Croatia. Compared to last year, we did not expect this number of infected people, given the COVID certificates. Last year, we had 11 infected people in our quarantine all summer, and significantly more this year. Last year, everything was open; there were no COVID certificates or tests," notes Andrej Kovač.

He explains that an additional problem for the infected is the inability to use public transport.

"If they are infected, they must not enter planes, trains, buses, or ferries. Everyone who comes to us is tested at the airport before leaving the country, or those who, before traveling, believing that they are healthy, were tested the day before in a lab. Of course, there happen to be positives among them. When we receive a report of an infected tourist through the county Red Cross, we pick them up in a vehicle with a protective barrier between the driver and the passenger and take them to quarantine. When they complete a ten-day quarantine, which starts exactly at midnight from the day the infection is determined and ends on the tenth day at midnight, they receive a confirmation from the epidemiologist in English that they have done it and can leave the country," explains Andrej Kovač.

Until August 1, for example, Germany allowed its infected citizens to return by car to the country and continue quarantine on its soil. Since then, Germans must also remain in quarantine and have a negative test when they return to Germany.

From the end of June until today, about a hundred tourists have passed through quarantine in Split. In comparison to other cities, Makarska has only just received an auxiliary, small quarantine. Trogir, for example, does not have quarantine, as Split covers that area. Brač, and the island of Hvar, has a quarantine area in reserve through which about five foreign nationals have already passed.

The contact person in coordination for Hvar is Katarina Buratović, director of the Red Cross City Society, who, together with members of the Hvar crisis headquarters, takes care of infected people in the quarantine there.

"The islands had to be organized because we cannot transport the infected to Split by public transport. There is no quarantine in Šibenik-Knin County; there is something in Dubrovnik-Neretva County. In fact, the greatest news is that there are no infected Croatian people," Andrej Kovač pointed out.

Discerning landlords allow COVID-positive to stay.

"It seems to me that we have COVID tourism. Some private renters are very polite and considerate, so they allow guests COVID-positive guests to stay in their facility as their quarantined accommodation and they cancel reservations for the next guests. They are not rude and throw people out on the street. True, we hear everything, that some behave the opposite, but we do not have records of such," says Kovač.

However, it is their duty to educate such renters on how to disinfect apartments after the departure of infected guests. There were situations when apartment owners called him at midnight and tourist accommodation owners who wanted guests transferred to the county quarantine.

"The biggest problem is that the entire Šibenik-Knin County and some other parts of Dalmatia gravitate towards Split Airport, where most tourists are tested before leaving the country. And all confirmed infected passengers from the airport are counted in Split and Split-Dalmatia County, which turns out to be the most problematic," said Kovač, who adds that Split and the rest of the county, as a result, rises to the top of the infamous infections list in Croatia.

That Split Airport is quite lively is also evidenced by current air traffic data. Compared to the pandemic 2020, in June this year, the total passenger traffic at Croatian airports was higher by 285.4 percent. The most passenger traffic was realized by Split Airport, with 115,000 passengers, which is 360.1 percent more than in June 2020, when only 25,000 passengers were transported (in June 2019, 510,000 passengers were transported).

Split Airport is followed by Zagreb Airport with 100,000 passengers (in June 2020, 43,000 passengers were transported and in June 2019 333,000 passengers), and Dubrovnik Airport with 59,000 passengers (in June 2020, only 10,000 passengers were transported, and the year before 414,000 passengers ).

For all you need to know about coronavirus specific to Croatia, make sure to bookmark our dedicated COVID-19 section and select your preferred language.

August 15, 2021 - Split-Dalmatia County maritime property records are now easy to find, thanks to Croatia's first-ever unified information system. 

HRTurizam reports that Split-Dalmatia County is the first in Croatia to implement a unified Information System for Split-Dalmatia County Maritime Property Records, ensuring the legality and transparency of operations and the availability and accuracy of all information regarding maritime property management as a precious natural resource.

It is a tool that combines the registers of established maritime domain boundaries, concessions on the maritime domain under the jurisdiction of Split-Dalmatia County, port areas, maritime domain management plans of cities and municipalities, and concession approvals on the maritime domain under the jurisdiction of local governments. Each of these registers consists of a database of spatial and attribute data and the associated documentation.

Split-Dalmatia County Prefect Blaženko Boban welcomed the Information System, which with the click of a mouse allows citizens to get all documents, contracts, decisions, the number of deckchairs, and the quantity of what the individual entity has received a concession for, and on that basis can immediately react to the inspection services via mobile phone.

After the training organized by the Board for Tourism and Maritime Affairs of Split-Dalmatia County in 2020, the number of cities and municipalities that developed the Plan through the application has grown, and today, you can look into 297 micro-locations, almost 2,500 funds on them, and over 1,000 entered items issued concession approvals. To date, 27 Maritime Property Management Plans have been developed, and a total of 400 cases from the area of ​​maritime domain boundaries and concessions and 52 port areas have been digitized.

The system was developed as a publicly available web gis application based on open source technologies, emphasizing functionality and simplicity, and optimized and adapted to users, their tasks, and expertise.

Almost one click shows all the decisions and changes to the decision on concessions, and you can see exactly the type of concession. This application will be useful for the citizens and for the inspections to determine the factual situation. Everyone can report the devastation of the maritime domain through the application.

The system is publicly available to all citizens at: https://www.pomorskodobro.dalmacija.hr/

Split-Dalmatia County was also the first in Europe to introduce Google sea view. This is a novelty on a European scale, in which the famous Google system ‘Street View’ received a sea route for the first time. And with it a depiction of the entire coastal belt of a region.

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August the 15th, 2021 - Some Croatian taxi drivers are taking advantage of the unexpectedly excellent tourist season and in an attempt to make as much money as possible, are refusing to accept journeys under 100 kuna.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, in the current rather unprecedented and positive situation in which the summer tourist season is in full swing and the streets are full of tourists, we're increasingly witnessing the rude tactics of various Croatian companies who are trying to make the most of the ignorance of foreign nationals and take advantage of the situation given their experience of the dire summer of 2020. While morally wrong to do to anyone, such attitudes and policies often affect local customers and consumers as well.

After the news broke that some greedy landlords renting out apartments to tourists are simply cancelling previously agreed reservations made by Croatian guests in order to rent out their apartments at higher prices to foreigners making last minute bookings, Croatian taxi drivers have also begun only accepting rides if they think they'll make good money on them. Slododna Dalmacija described the infuriating experience of one woman from Split attempting to book a taxi.

''It isn't enough to say that it's been driving me insane. I've heard countless times that Croatian taxi drivers are talking amongst themselves about how they won't accept a ride if its less than 100 kuna. They won't even accept your card for payment, only cash. It's horrible what they're doing, but as soon as winter comes around, that 30 kuna from a local man will come in handy,'' she said.

Milivoj Topic, president of the carrier's guild at the Association of Craftsmen of the City of Split, explained what lies behind the story about certain Croatian taxi drivers and an epidemic of greed among them. In particular, it is a matter of market liberalisation and therefore taxi drivers and other such carriers can set whatever prices they want to.

''That gives you the right to charge as much as you want for your services. It's a competition,'' he said, adding:

"In the past maybe four or five months, we advocated for order in terms of taxi transport. We reached some kind of agreement, everything was already down on paper, but in the end, Transport Minister Oleg Butkovic just ignored everything and left things as they are, and the way they are means disorder and non-transparency,'' he concluded.

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August the 15th, 2021 - Many Croatian enterprises are hoping for a slice of the European Defense Fund's proverbial cake, worth a massive 7.8 billion euros in total.

As Poslovni Dnevnik/Darko Bicak writes, the European Defense Fund (EDF) has a huge 7.9 billion euros at its disposal, which will be distributed to companies from the military-industrial complex of the European Union, and Croatia, especially the Zagreb-based Dok-Ing, is counting on some serious sums.

However, as almost all European funds have some specifics to them, EDF has the condition that companies from the smallest European Union countries, such as Croatian enterprises, must participate in a specific project.

This was also the key reason for the recent signing of the Business Cooperation Agreement on applications for the European Defense Fund between the Croatian Defense Industry Competitiveness Cluster (HKKOI) and the Estonian Industrial Association of the Security and Defense Industry (EDIA).

The Croatian cluster has already signed a similar agreement with Portugal, and the same has been announced for September with the same institution in neighbouring Slovenia.

As explained by Gordan Pesic from HKKOI, Dok-Ing's business development manager, this is an important step for withdrawing money from EU funds, but at the same time a complementary cooperation of partners in the development and improvement of products that will be globally competitive.

In this particular case, it is a matter of joining forces on the upgrade of the recently introduced Dok-ing modular robotic system called Komodo.

"We're targeting connections with industry associations across individual European countries that we estimate have companies with complementary technologies, and based on that, this cooperation is reduced from the national and institutional level to the level of the companies themselves. In this way, companies can create consortia to apply for the future European Defense Fund,'' Pesic said, adding that EDF came to life last month, and that he expects that Croatian enterprises will be able to contact it in as early as 2022.

For now, he says, it isn't possible to estimate just how much capacity the Croatian industry has to withdraw money because it will depend on quality projects.

In addition to that, all of the companies participating in this model, whether they be Croatian enterprises or those from another EU member state, have to have cooperation with the national Ministry of Defense in order to define the technical and tactical features by which the industry would then develop the technology.

With EDF, the ice should be broken for Croatian enterprises by Dok-Ing itself, which will develop the technology for its base platform of the autonomous diesel-electric system Komodo.

“So far, three Croatian enterprises are involved in the project, Dok-Ing itself, which developed the platform, us, the Osijek-based technology company Orqa, which is best known for its smart drone control glasses, as well as for low-latency video information technology, and now the project also includes three Estonian companies that will develop real-time information processing technology,'' said Ivan Jelusic, the founder of Orqa.

It was announced that more partners are set to join the project, although for now they didn't want to talk about any names specifically.

The Estonian cluster

Ingvar Parnamae, a member of the Board of Directors of the Estonian EDIA, pointed out that the defense cluster there includes 107 private companies that generated 209 million euros in revenue back in 2019, of which 100.3 million euros were from exports alone.

He added that most of their members are focused on high technology, be it cyber security, border control, communications, electronic warfare, military medicine, all the way to robotics, drones, simulators and protective equipment to combat vehicles and vessels and equipment for them.

At the end of June, Dok-Ing, a global leader in the production of autonomous vehicles for demining, mining and firefighting, presented its new project - Komodo, which, as they say, is a synthesis of all of the previous knowledge and technology of this company in one single product.

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