Ankaran

"Ankaran is what happens when a coastline gets to be ordinary instead of famous."

A sleepy former monastery town at the northern edge of the Slovenian coast, with the country's best sandy beach and almost none of its tourist traffic.

Pierre Words & photographs

We ended up in Ankaran on the recommendation of a woman running the apartment we’d rented in Koper, who said, with real conviction, “if you want to just swim, go to Ankaran, don’t waste your day in Piran fighting for beach space.” I was skeptical — nothing about Ankaran shows up in the usual roundups of Slovenian coastal towns — but she turned out to be exactly right.

Slovenia’s Best Beach, and Nobody Told Me

Most of the Slovenian coast is rocky or concrete-shelved, a consequence of geography rather than neglect. Ankaran has an actual sandy beach, one of the only real ones in the country, backed by pine woods that give real shade rather than the parasol rentals everywhere else. On a Tuesday in late June we had long stretches of sand practically to ourselves, save for a handful of families and a few older men doing unhurried laps parallel to shore. There’s a public section and a paid section with loungers; the free section, further from the parking lot, is better anyway.

Pine-shaded sandy shoreline at Ankaran beach on a quiet weekday morning

The Monastery on the Hill

Ankaran takes its name from a Benedictine monastery that has stood above the bay since the 13th century, now restored and operating partly as a hotel and event space. We wandered up in the late afternoon, more out of curiosity than expectation, and found a cool, quiet cloister with views back down over the bay toward Koper’s port cranes and, on the clearest days, the coast of Italy. It costs nothing to walk the grounds, and almost nobody does.

The old Benedictine monastery at Ankaran overlooking the bay in late afternoon light

A Coastal Path With Almost No One On It

From Ankaran, a flat coastal path runs toward Debeli Rtič and eventually the Italian border, an easy walk or bike ride through pine forest with the sea always visible through the trees. We rented bikes from a stand near the marina and covered the whole stretch in under two hours, stopping twice for nothing more than the view.

When to go: June and early September for warm water and thin crowds — even in peak summer, Ankaran doesn’t draw the numbers Piran or Portorož do, so this is one stretch of coast where late July is still a reasonable option.

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