Croatia Road Trip Day 6 - Crikvenica

As regular readers will have noticed, I’ve been somewhat distracted, in a good way, from the chronicles of our Croatia trip and got slightly ahead of myself in the last posting which was triggered by a photo from Day 8!

On Day 6 we went from Kraljevica to Novi Vinodolski and our first stop was Crikvenica where I saw some brave souls having a dip in the chilly, early May, Adriatic.

There are quite a few elements to Crikvenica and it covers a large area with plenty of, mostly sandy,  beaches, including a Dog Beach. Primarily though, it’s a resort town full of cafés, bars restaurants, ice cream parlours and souvenir shops, but it’s also got bags of character. Parking for the campervan wasn’t that easy and there were plenty of signs saying “No Motorhomes”  so I wondered where the bigger ones might go. On the plus side, the drive down from the main road was nice and easy – not too steep or bendy!

The large main square hosts the tourist office, the post office and several banks, and there are plenty of moorings for boats of most sizes. Crikvenica also seems to have rather a lot of statues and it always seems to be the statues that lead into the real history of a place. There are some busts of famous Crikvenica residents dotted about all of whom played a part in the Partisan resistance during the occupation of Italy, and later Germany.  The history is fascinating, if complex, and the following  link will take you to a great account of it, as well as detailing the relevance of the various statues (scroll down to Crikvenica) Croatian History.net - Chapter One

The Croatian Tourist Board describes Crikvenica as “one of the most beautiful tourist destinations on the Kvarner coast” and I can see why it must be popular –plenty of space , sandy beaches….. All the same, in places it did look in need of a little TLC. Most of the hotels are two and three star and I suspect it’s just one of those places where the tourism infrastucture is of an earlier era and waiting for some new investment.