Istria and the Price of Returning

For generations, Istria was the holiday people returned to without a second thought. As prices rise, that familiarity faces a new test: what makes a place worth coming back to?

By Chiara Gelmini

I grew up in Trieste, a city in north-eastern Italy at the northern end of the Adriatic, only a few kilometres from the Slovenian border, where Istria has always occupied a peculiar place in people’s lives: unmistakably across a border, yet never entirely foreign. For much of the twentieth century, crossing that border was anything but casual. After the Second World War, the area around Trieste was divided between Allied-administered Zone A and Yugoslav-administered Zone B, while the post-war settlement was accompanied by the Istrian exodus, before the border arrangement was stabilised in 1954. Yet the land beyond it remained deeply familiar — through language, food, shared habits and family histories that long predated the political lines drawn across the region.

Istria is therefore not only part of Trieste’s geography of summer, but of its family geography too: many people from Trieste have parents, grandparents or earlier generations who were born there. And this culture of return extends far beyond Trieste. For generations, Croatians, Slovenians, Italians, Germans, Austrians and visitors from further north in Europe have made parts of the peninsula their second summer home, often returning to the same village, campsite, apartment or stretch of coast year after year.

The peninsula itself is divided between three countries — Croatia, Slovenia and, in a tiny portion around Muggia, Italy — and stretches south to Cape Kamenjak, near the village of Premantura. From Trieste, it is close enough to reach the coast for a swim and be home by evening, familiar enough to recognise flavours, words and habits, yet different enough to preserve the feeling of having crossed into somewhere else.

Photography: Chiara Gelmini. Donkey photograph: Ifo Ifoland.

For me, Istria is also a kind of everyday archaeology of the former Yugoslavia: Cedevita vitamin drinks, pašteta (pâté), the smiling Kinder Lada cow surviving for decades on cups and glasses; the konobe (traditional taverns), campsites, pine woods, houses furnished with little concern for whatever happened to be fashionable at the time. And, above all, a philosophy of holidays: simple, just spartan enough, preferably close to the sea, perhaps a little wild and, for those who wanted it, FKK — the German abbreviation used for naturist beaches and campsites.

It was never a luxury paradise. That was rather the point.

Perhaps that familiarity is precisely why the change was so easy to notice.

In August 2026, when I returned to Istria, I had an unusual feeling: where was everybody?

I was there around Ferragosto — 15 August, the symbolic high point of the Italian summer holiday season, when roads towards the coast, campsites and beaches are traditionally at their busiest. Istria was certainly not empty. But it felt remarkably quiet for that particular moment of the year: the roads were less congested than I remembered, the beaches less relentlessly crowded, getting around unexpectedly easy. Even Dragonja, a border crossing between Slovenia and Croatia — a name that, in the memory of many Triestine summers, automatically means “endless queue” — seemed unusually easy to pass through.

There is a practical explanation for the easier border crossing. Croatia joined the Schengen area, where routine internal border checks are normally removed, in 2023. Slovenia later temporarily reinstated checks on its border with Croatia, but announced on 11 June 2026 that they would end at midnight.

But the sense that something had changed did not come from traffic alone.

For several years now, the same observation has circulated among people who regularly holiday in Croatia: it has become very expensive. Alongside it comes another claim, harder to measure: some of those who once returned every summer have begun choosing somewhere else.

What I had noticed in one familiar corner of the Adriatic seemed to point to a broader question: what happens when a destination people have chosen almost by habit stops feeling like the obvious choice?

So I tried to find out how much truth there was in that impression.

The tourists are still there

The numbers complicate the impression. According to the Croatian Bureau of Statistics, Istria County — the Croatian administrative region, rather than the entire peninsula — recorded 26.4 million overnight stays in commercial accommodation in 2019, the last full pre-pandemic year, rising to 28.3 million in 2025. There has been no collapse. Yet the monthly picture is uneven: in May 2026 overnight stays were up 26.1% year on year; in June they were down 10%. Holiday and school calendars may help explain such swings. Two months alone do not establish a lasting shift in when people visit, let alone explain how quiet the coast felt in August.

The tourist is not necessarily disappearing. What may be disappearing is the default tourist.

By that I mean the person who returned every year to the same campsite, the same apartment, perhaps even the same bay, without thinking too much about what the same money might buy somewhere else — valuing familiarity and predictability more than novelty or discovery.

“What may be disappearing is the default tourist.”

Memory has a price

A similar picture emerges in the media of the countries that have supplied Croatian tourism for decades.

In July 2026, Slovenian news outlet 24UR described a Croatia gradually losing its reputation as an affordable destination. Its most interesting observation concerned repeat visitors. Someone arriving for the first time compares Croatian prices with current prices in Italy, Spain or Greece. Someone who has been returning for ten or twenty years also compares them with memory. According to the article, these long-standing visitors most sharply perceive changes in the relationship between what they pay and what they receive. At the same time, bookings are being made later, free cancellation has become more important, and travellers appear increasingly willing to switch countries.

In Austria, public broadcaster ORF reported a more specific observation. Felix König, spokesman for Upper Austria’s travel agencies, observed that more customers are choosing Italy instead of Croatia — not necessarily because Italy is cheap, but because everyday spending in Croatia, particularly on food and drink, has risen so sharply.

Similar concerns had surfaced in Friuli Venezia Giulia, the Italian region that includes Trieste. In summer 2024, RAI’s regional news service, TGR, interviewed travel agencies reporting disappointing sales for Croatia. The reasoning some customers gave was simple: if the holiday is going to cost a lot anyway, they might as well travel farther.

None of these reports tells us how many repeat visitors Croatia has actually lost. The statistics cited here record visitors’ countries of residence, not how many summers someone has spent at the same campsite.

But the recurrence of the same perception in Slovenia, Austria and Italy suggests that some visitors are reconsidering Croatia.

Loyalty can no longer be taken for granted.

How the euro changes the comparison

Croatia adopted the euro on 1 January 2023. For many long-time visitors to the coast, that moment has become the symbolic point at which “everything got expensive”.

Economically, however, the relationship is less straightforward.

Eurostat estimated that the direct effect of adopting the euro on Croatia’s monthly inflation rate in January 2023 amounted to just 0.04 to 0.18 percentage points, with no statistically significant additional effect in February or March. The European Central Bank reached a similar conclusion: the currency changeover had a limited overall impact, even if some services did show unusually large price increases.

At the same time, energy, food, labour and operating costs were all rising as part of an inflationary wave affecting Europe as a whole.

That does not mean the price problem is imaginary. Quite the opposite: Croatian institutions themselves openly acknowledge it.

In 2025, tourism minister Tonči Glavina said that between 2022 and autumn 2024 tourism prices had risen by around 50%, warning that such increases were unsustainable unless accompanied by a corresponding improvement in quality. In May 2026, the government again publicly urged tourism operators to adopt reasonable and competitive pricing.

Perhaps, though, the most interesting effect of the euro is not its effect on inflation.

It is its effect on comparison.

I remember that small mental detour well. With the kuna, Croatia’s former currency, prices belonged to another system. You had to divide, convert, approximate. Before leaving, you remembered the kuna left in a drawer since the previous summer, or stopped at one of the exchange offices on the way. A bill for 300 kuna did not register quite as immediately as one for 40 euros.

Today, a visitor from Trieste, Ljubljana, Vienna or Munich opens a menu and sees the same unit of currency used at home.

You don’t have to wonder what something really costs.

You know.

For visitors from countries outside the euro area, including Sweden, conversion is still part of the calculation — although prices across euro-area destinations are now easier to compare.

And when the price of dinner, an apartment or a day by the sea begins to approach what you would pay in Italy or other Mediterranean destinations, the question changes too.

No longer: Can I afford Croatia?

But: At this price, why Croatia?

More expensive does not mean more valuable

The issue now seems to have reached the centre of Croatian tourism policy. In May 2026, prime minister Andrej Plenković said that, with national totals of roughly 22 million arrivals and 110 million overnight stays, Croatian tourism had reached the limits of quantitative growth and now needed to take the prices of competing Mediterranean destinations seriously.

That could be good news.

Istria does not necessarily need to crowd its beaches, roads and car parks even further for a few weeks each year. Tourism that is less concentrated in July and August, with stays spread more evenly across spring and autumn, could be better for both visitors and residents.

More cautious demand and later bookings do not, by themselves, mean that tourism is becoming more sustainable. But there are signs of greater interest in travel outside peak season. In June 2026, Croatia’s Ministry of Tourism and Sport highlighted the growing importance of travel before and after the summer peak, while warning of more cautious demand in its main international markets and urging operators to offer better value for money.

Annual statistics can therefore remain excellent while the way a destination is chosen and experienced changes profoundly.

But for a place built so strongly on return, numbers are only part of the story. A visitor who comes back to the same coast for ten summers is not simply ten bookings. Habit, familiarity and loyalty are part of the destination’s value. Once that return is no longer automatic, the relationship changes: every new season becomes a fresh comparison with somewhere else.

That is why increasing the value of tourism is not the same thing as simply increasing prices. Becoming more expensive does not mean becoming more valuable.

“Becoming more expensive does not mean becoming more valuable.”

If Istria’s transformation into a higher-value destination meant nothing more than higher prices, standardised services and a generically “premium” aesthetic, it could end up losing precisely what made people return without needing to ask themselves why.

Because I still think of Istria as a blessed land: the slopes planted with olive trees and vines, the red earth, the deep sea and harsh rocks of the coastline; fuži pasta with truffles, walnut liqueur and honey; the pine woods, the konobe and that increasingly rare possibility of imagining a holiday without too many frills.

I do not think Istria needs to become “cheap” again. Nor would chasing new records in visitor numbers at the cost of ever more land and landscape be any less short-sighted.

The challenge is harder: to improve quality without erasing simplicity; to distribute tourism more evenly throughout the year; to make prices correspond to the actual value of the experience; to support what is local and, above all, to protect the landscape that makes everything else possible.

Perhaps the goal should not be to restore the old automatic loyalty, but to give people good reasons to keep choosing to return.

More than anything, I hope it can do so without sacrificing this extraordinary land.

Because perhaps what made a holiday in Istria special was never simply that it cost little.

It was that so little was still enough to feel good.

Chiara Gelmini is an Italian art writer, curator and interdisciplinary artist. With a background in visual and performing arts and aesthetics, she works across contemporary art, music, performance and cultural education. Her work is shaped by travel, cultural crossings and the porous thresholds between places, disciplines and artistic languages. Her writing explores the relationships between artworks, exhibition contexts and audiences, and art as a space for encounter. Read more articles by Chiara Gelmini here.

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