Valamar Blog

What is your impression of Istria? What does it mean to you? What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word „Istria“? While I was spending my August Sunday morning drinking coffee in one of our tourist destinations on the western Istrian coast, I heard two young girls, tourist workers, asking passers-by these three questions, handing out Istrian souvenirs and inviting them to a presentation of indigenous Istrian products. Each tourist interested in the event was asked three questions, the very three from the beginning of this post.

Off course, answers coming from people living here and from visitors coming to Istria as tourists were mostly quite different. When local people describe Istria, very often one of the following happens: people either do not see or do not appreciate enough the place they live in or, on the other hand, they go to the other extreme and overrate its importance. As always, the truth is somewhere in the middle, and this middle or objectivity can be provided by those people who visit Istria as tourists and are in the position to compare it to other destinations they visited.

I must admit that the ratio of positive and negative impressions of Istria is quite a nice surprise because a large majority of people has a very positive impression of Istria and very few people react negatively to staying here. For all these reasons, I decided to write a series of 7 posts on the impressions of Istria; these will be issued on Fridays, and in them I will try to combine objective impressions and feedback of the very passengers with my personal view of the whole story.

Seven posts that will be issued on the next seven Fridays:
- Istria: People
- Istria: Preservation and authenticity
- Istria: Enogastronomic specificity
- Istria: Historical heritage
- Istria: Traditional cultural identity
- Istria: Modern cultural identity
- Istria: Adventure, relaxation, fun…

Popularity: 9% [?]