Brijuni

Brijuni is the smallest of Croatia's national parks and the strangest: fourteen islands and islets two kilometres off Fažana, of which roughly four-fifths of the protected area is water. The park boundary is not a coastline at all but a set of straight lines run between coordinates in the sea, which is why it draws as a plain polygon offshore. Veliki Brijun, the main island, is about five and a half square kilometres of parkland, oak and laurel — and after a century of deliberate landscaping it reads less like wild Adriatic karst than like an English estate that drifted south.

The layered history is the point. On the shore of Verige bay stand the foundations of a Roman maritime villa of the first century BC, spread over a kilometre of waterfront with its own fishponds and temples — one of the best-preserved seaside villa complexes anywhere on the Adriatic. Above it are a Byzantine castrum, a Venetian-era church, and, on the exposed rock of the southern shore, dinosaur footprints: several hundred of them, Cretaceous, left in what was then a coastal mudflat and now weathering slowly out of the limestone. The modern chapter begins in 1893, when the Austrian industrialist Paul Kupelwieser bought the malarial, half-abandoned islands and hired Robert Koch to clear them of anopheles — which he did, in one of the first successful applications of quinine prophylaxis at scale — turning Brijuni into a fashionable Habsburg spa resort with a golf course and a heated seawater pool.

Then came Josip Broz Tito, who first visited in 1947 and from 1953 kept the islands as his official state residence, making them effectively the diplomatic back room of non-aligned Yugoslavia. He spent something like four months of each year here until his last stay in 1979, and received some ninety heads of state; the 1956 meeting on Brijuni between Tito, Nehru and Nasser is conventionally taken as the founding moment of the Non-Aligned Movement. The safari park at the island's northern end is a direct residue of that traffic — a collection assembled from animals arriving as diplomatic gifts, among them zebras from Sékou Touré, zebu cattle from Nehru, and the Indian elephant Lanka, sent by Indira Gandhi and still alive on the island. Brijuni became a national park in 1983, three years after Tito's death, and took its present boundaries in 1999.

What's worth knowing before you go

Access is controlled: the only public route is the national park's own boat from Fažana, a fifteen-minute crossing, booked ahead in summer, and visits to Veliki Brijun run as a package with the little tourist train or a rented bicycle. Nothing else in the archipelago is open without a permit. Fažana is a short bus ride from Pula, which has the airport, the rail terminus, and a Roman amphitheatre of its own. May, June and September are the months worth having — July and August put the whole day's quota on one island.

The connoisseur's move is to skip the train and take a bicycle, then ride out to Verige bay in the late afternoon after the last group has gone back: the villa's foundations run right down to the water, the bay is quiet, and it becomes obvious why a Roman senator, an Austrian industrialist and a Yugoslav president all reached the same conclusion about this particular stretch of coast.