Book the table before you book the room. Rovinj is a town of thirteen thousand people on the Istrian coast, and three of the fourteen Michelin-starred restaurants in Croatia are inside it, including the only two-star kitchen in the country. Then get up early and go to the fish market, a few minutes' walk from any of them.
Agli Amici Rovinj has held its two stars for three years running. Cap Aureo has one. Monte has one as well, and took Michelin's service award in the 2026 Croatian selection, though its older distinction is the one that counts: when the guide first covered Croatia in 2017, Monte was the first restaurant in the country to be given a star. It stands in the house where its chef, Danijel Dekic, was born, and which his parents had opened as an Istrian tavern in 1985.
Book all three a long way ahead, and know what you are booking into. This is a season town. The kitchens that matter keep to the season, and if you come in November you will find a good part of the old town shuttered and the boats not running.
The reason those kitchens are here is tied up alongside them. Rovinj is still a working fishing port, and the market sits on the northern edge of the old town by the Valdibora car park, produce under the awnings and the fish in a hall of its own. Go early. The stalls open at the top of the morning and the best of the catch does not last; the produce side is aimed at visitors more than at the town, and the fish hall is a different proposition entirely.
What the town keeps beside the restaurants is a boat. A batana is flat-bottomed and flat-sided, four to six metres long, and has been built in Rovinj since about the 1750s. The flat bottom is the entire design: it lets the boat work a metre of water hard against the rocks, which is where the fish are. They are still built by hand, to no drawings and with no power tools, using an axe, a saw and chisels. In 2016 UNESCO put the project that keeps all of this going on its Register of Good Safeguarding Practices, which is a separate and much smaller list than the famous one.
The singing came out of the same constraint as the hull. A bitinada is sung with no instruments at all, because the hands were busy on the nets and the oars: one man improvises a line and the rest answer him with a refrain. A spacio was the front room a fishing family kept and sold its own wine out of. You can still get the whole of it in one evening. The ecomuseum on the harbour rows visitors out through the summer, four to six people to a boat with a fisherman on the oars, and the evening ends at a spacio with about thirty of you eating together. Book it several days ahead, because the boats are small and there are not many of them.
In 1911 the last Austrian census found Rovinj 97.8 per cent Italian-speaking. In 2011 the figure was 11.3.
That gap is why the boat is worth your attention rather than your indulgence. After the Peace of Paris in 1947 and through the mid-1950s most of Rovinj's Italian population left, for Italy and for South America, and the town has been shrinking since. It is still officially bilingual, and Rovinj and Rovigno are equally official. The older local speech is not Italian at all: Istriot is its own Romance language, called Ruvignis here, with about four hundred native speakers when it was last counted in 2007 and a severely endangered rating from UNESCO. The bitinade are sung in it.
The old town you walk through was an island until 1763, when the channel to the mainland was filled in, which is why the lanes are so tight and the houses climb. Venice governed here from 1283 to 1797 and left the plan, the gates and the language. Balbi's Arch, dated 1680, is the way in from the harbour square, with a Venetian lion set over it. Grisia climbs from there to the church, and on the second Sunday of August it has been an open-air exhibition every year since 1967, hundreds of works hung along the walls and the doorways, established painters and local children on the same stones. Leave the car outside; none of this is open to traffic.
The church on the summit is baroque, built between 1725 and 1736, and it holds a Roman sarcophagus of the sixth century containing the relics of the saint the town is named for. How that sarcophagus reached Rovinj is told as legend and is worth hearing as one. The bell tower beside it went up from 1654 on the model of the campanile at St Mark's, and a copper Euphemia turns on the top of it as a weathervane.
You can climb the tower, and it is worth knowing what you are climbing before you start. The staircase is old and wooden, the treads are open, and the drop stays visible through them the whole way up. There is no lift and no switchback. If heights trouble you at all, stay at the bottom; the view from the churchyard is already the best in the town. Whatever you decide, do not be at the top at noon, when the bells go directly above your head.
Swimming here is off rock. Balota lies directly beneath the old town walls, a slab of bare limestone with ladders into water that drops away immediately, no shade anywhere on it, and it suits confident swimmers and nobody else. Walk south and the shore softens: Lone bay is pebble and calm about a kilometre and a half out, and the coves at Skaraba beyond it stay quieter than anything closer in. Boats for Sveta Katarina and Crveni otok leave the harbour about hourly in season and take a quarter of an hour. Check the last one back before you settle in on the far side.
The forest park behind those coves is not natural. Georg Hutterott, an entrepreneur from Trieste, bought the headland in 1890 and began planting it, which is how fifty-two hectares of Istrian cape came to hold Lebanese cedar, Douglas fir, ginkgo and eucalyptus among the pine and laurel, with Himalayan cedars set out in a six-pointed star near the meadow. It has been protected since 1961. There is free climbing on the sea cliffs at the end of it.
Come in September if you can. The peak runs from the last week of July to the middle of August, and the scale of it is not a matter of impression: on 24 September 2023 Rovinj became the first destination in Croatia to pass four million overnight stays in a year, off 665,847 arrivals, and 46 per cent of those nights were spent in campsites. The resident population is 12,968. Pula airport is about forty kilometres away and runs seasonally, thirty to forty-five minutes by shuttle; Venice is the year-round alternative.
Two nights is the honest length. One gets you the lanes, the tower and a good dinner. The second gets you the fish hall at opening, the boats going out, and an evening on the water that cannot be had at all between a morning coach and an afternoon one. Book that evening before you book anything else. There are only a few boats, and they take six at a time.