First Hotels on the Adriatic

During the late 19th and early 20th century, as well as today, the growth of tourism in Croatia was most evident through the construction of hotels. In the late 19th century, health tourism started developing along the coast and the popularity of resort tourism also increased. Construction began on grand hotels surrounded by parks, in the then-dominant Historicist style of architecture.

Opatija was the focal point of hotel construction and two representative hotels were built here: Kvarner (Quarnero) and Imperial (Stephanie) in 1884 and 1885 respectively. This was the beginning of a massive construction project that resulted in some hundred hotels, guesthouses and residential villas being constructed until World War I.

The quality of hotel architecture, especially in more well-known tourism centers like Opatija, Dubrovnik, Mali Lošinj, Crikvenica and Brijuni, competed with the French or Italian Riviera hotel architecture at the time. Unlike the French or Italian, who have included their hotel tradition and heritage in modern tourism, Croatian hotel architectural heritage has not yet been sufficiently recognized and explored as a valuable tourist asset. This exhibition aims to fill that void and encourage further analysis of hotel tourist heritage as an important resource in modern tourism.