Labin

The mining shaft has been sealed but the entrance is still there at the edge of the old town, framed in concrete that doesn’t belong architecturally but makes the history legible. Coal was mined under this hill for centuries — Labin was one of Istria’s industrial towns, its elegant Venetian old town balanced somewhat improbably on top of an underground geography of tunnels and extraction. The last mine closed in 1999. The town, which had been reinventing itself as an art community since the 1970s, finished what it had started and became something that is quietly difficult to categorise.

I drove up from the coast on a weekday morning and arrived to find the main square almost empty, a café just opening, and views east toward the Kvarner Gulf that explained immediately why this particular hill has been inhabited since at least the Bronze Age. The islands of Cres and Lošinj were visible on the horizon. The water below was the specific dark blue of the northern Adriatic, different from the turquoise of the western Istrian coast, and the hillside below the old town dropped through terraced vineyards and then olive trees before reaching the modern resort town of Rabac, directly below, which is Labin’s twin and opposite: beach hotels, cafes, boats for hire.

The art republic status began in 1977 when artists started occupying studios in the old town’s abandoned or underused spaces. The designation stuck and the town leaned into it with more conviction than most places adopt an identity. Walking the old town now, you pass galleries in stone houses, studios with open windows showing work in progress, a museum in the former town hall that holds both the expected medieval history and an exhibition on the mining era that is more affecting than you’d anticipate. The murals that appear on external walls range from mediocre to genuinely beautiful, and the mixture feels honest — a real community’s relationship to art rather than a curated street-art intervention.

The Baroque church on the main square was locked the morning I was there, but a woman coming out of the door across the street offered to find the key without my asking. We had a conversation in the doorway about the frescoes inside — yes, there are frescoes, sixteenth century, not remarkable in the Istrian context but worth seeing — in a mixture of Croatian and English and Italian that covered about forty percent of what either of us was actually saying. She found the key. The frescoes were not remarkable. The exchange was entirely worth it.

The walk down to Rabac takes about twenty minutes on a path through pine forest, passing old terraces and a vineyard that seemed semi-abandoned but had grape leaves turning gold in the October light. Rabac in summer is a package-holiday resort with the specific atmosphere of places built entirely for a seasonal purpose. In September it empties rapidly and becomes a place of restaurants doing their best work for fewer customers, the beach clubs packing away their sunbeds, and the light on the water in the late afternoon achieving something that the summer crowds never notice because they’re looking at their phones.

When to go: Late spring through early summer (May–June) and September for the combination of warmth and navigable crowds. The art programme in Labin’s old town runs year-round and winter visits give the old town a quiet that makes its Venetian architecture more legible — you can actually hear your own footsteps. Avoid peak August unless Rabac beach is specifically on your agenda.