Decades before the touristic hype surrounding Croatia’s biggest peninsula awoke authoritative 22-year-old blogging experts to share their wisdom on what to see/do/taste/visit/experience during your 7-14 day-long vacation on the heart-shaped peninsula, things didn’t look as bright for Croatia’s top touristic region.
The following is a commented comment on the rise and the importance of the rise of Istria as a higher quality tourist destination by someone who has been involved in the (on-going) process of positioning Istria as one of Europe’s top tourism destinations. He made the comment a year ago on a German Facebook page where “concerned” German tourists raised questions on the sustainability, authenticity and environmental impact of the 4 and 5-star hotels, camps, water parks, pricy restaurants and other investments made and announced at that time by domestic and foreign companies in Istrian tourism, while they were nostalgic about the Istria they used to know.
We both had similar comments as an answer to the concerns expressed in the original Facebook post and both published our reactions to the development almost at the same time. A few months later, we met at Pula’s Milan restaurant with a group of German and Austrian tourism journalists and continued our mutual back tapping, while the blackest of all black risottos went cold and the Malvasia warmed up to room temperature.
There are two sides to everything. As Istria decided to take a step back from the mass tourism of the 70’s and 80’s of the past century, following the war in the first half of the 90’s, the Istrian hinterland was dying out. Young people were leaving for bigger cities in Croatia and abroad, as there were no employment opportunities, agriculture decayed, as there were no buyers for the products. Village schools closed as there were fewer and fewer families with children in the villages and at the now famed hilltop towns.
Although I personally very much appreciate camping and apartment holiday makers, it weren’t them (many of them would even bring their own food from Germany, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and other countries) who caused the turnaround in the development strategy of tourism on the peninsula. One has to be fair and say that the guests willing to pay more for accommodation at better hotels and more for better meals at better restaurants made it possible for the rural population to return and live from their land and entrepreneurship... continues tomorrow, August 3.
