Brijuni Islands

The zebra was eating grass about fifteen metres from the path, apparently unbothered by my presence. Behind it, through the pines, the Adriatic was the colour of a swimming pool in a magazine. Further down the track, a sign indicated dinosaur footprints preserved in a rock outcrop near the shore. I had been on Brijuni for approximately forty minutes and had already given up trying to process one thing before the next arrived.

The ferry from Fažana takes fifteen minutes and deposits you on Veli Brijun, the largest of the fourteen islands in the Brijuni archipelago, which has been a Croatian national park since 1983. The island has been many things before that designation: a Roman estate in the first century, a malarial backwater for most of the Middle Ages, an Austro-Hungarian resort in the late nineteenth century — drained of malaria by a Viennese bacteriologist named Robert Koch, which is not a sentence you expect to write about an Adriatic island — and finally the private summer residence of Josip Broz Tito from 1947 until his death in 1980.

The Tito connection is inescapable and, once you accept it, entertaining. The museum in the old Austro-Hungarian hotel complex displays photographs of the dictator receiving foreign guests: Nasser, Nehru, Haile Selassie, Queen Elizabeth II, a young Sophia Loren who visited for reasons the caption declines to explain. The exotic animals in the safari park — the zebras, the deer, a small herd of llamas — are the descendants of creatures given as diplomatic gifts during those years of Non-Aligned Movement hospitality. It is the strangest origin story for a wildlife exhibit I have encountered anywhere.

The Roman ruins at Verige Bay are older than all of this and, away from the museum crowds, considerably more affecting. The bay is sheltered and still, the water so transparent that the submerged foundations of fish tanks and harbour walls are visible from a small boat or a clear day’s snorkelling. The villa complex on shore ran to baths, granaries, a temple — the usual equipment of a wealthy Roman holiday residence, now reduced to walls a metre high and the plan of a life lived here in the first century. I walked through it alone in the early afternoon while a tour group was somewhere else, and sat for a while on a piece of wall above the water, thinking about the continuity of the bay: the same anchorage, the same quality of light, the same small fish visible in the same clear shallows.

The golf course — also Tito’s — is still operational, eighteen holes through the pines, and has the particular quality of things that survive their original purpose into a different era. The electric vehicles that ferry visitors around the island pass the golf course, the safari park, the dinosaur footprints, and the Roman ruins in a single loop that manages to be both absurd and genuinely memorable.

When to go: May through September for swimming and the full natural park experience — the ferry runs year-round but the water is most inviting from June onward. Early morning departures from Fažana are worth the alarm: the island is tourist-dense by midday in July and August, but the first ferry brings you into the bay before the crowds, and the Roman ruins at Verige Bay are extraordinary in morning light.