Tourists pour into Istria

[Peter Ellis]

From the Croatian Times

Over one million tourists poured into Croatia on the first weekend of August in large part thanks to the beginning of Ferragosto holidays celebrated this month in Italy.

The Kastel border crossing in Istria registered 77,177 vehicles alone between Friday and 12 pm on Sunday. Added to the numbers from six other popular border crossings, the total number of new vehicles entering Croatia this first weekend is 255,347. And according to police estimates, with 3.5 persons per vehicle, some 900,000 tourists entered Croatia by roads only.

The estimates do not take into account those who arrived by plane, boat and across other border crossings, where numbers are also expected to be high, judging from the rise of activity in airports and ports.

But the weekend also saw large numbers of people leave for their holidays with some 600,000 Croatians heading off for foreign destinations, the daily Jutarnji List writes.

[Peter Ellis]

I don't think I have ever seen so many different nationalities as here this year.

It doesn't seem long since we were raising money for Polish and Romanian medical charities but this year the number of Polish registered cars appearing in Istria has been tremendous and even the Romanians are appearing in large numbers. They are not appearing in rusty old Dacias, either !
All this is on top of all the Scandinavians, Balts, Dutch, Germans, Austrians, Italians, Belgians and Swiss, who always come. We have seen increasing numbers of French visitors in recent years and the French are starting to buy here. We see the odd Spanish car but I think the only European country whose cars I haven't seen down here is Portugal.
We are also seeing more Serbian cars this year as the difficulties of the past fade away.