July the 11th, 2024 – Rabac in Kvarner Bay was once a sleepy fishing town without a great deal ever going on. It then transformed into a tourist destination. It turns out, there’s plenty most don’t know about it. Did you know it once boasted its own cable car?
When you think of cable cars in Croatia, your mind likely goes straight to the one in Dubrovnik, and then to the one which took forever to come to be (and still has its issues), in Zagreb. One takes you up Srdj, and the other up Sljeme. You likely don’t think of Rabac, but you’d be wrong not to!
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes, local people in Rabac are quick to point out that they actually had a cable car almost half a century before Zagreb did.
“Ours was for mining. It was nine kilometres long and transported bauxite from the mines down there to the port. It was mostly used a very long time ago, back during the war in Abyssinia,” Rabac locals say, pointing to the Teleferik, a monument to their long industrial history.
“The first tourists to come to Rabac from abroad were Czechs. We even have a part of the forest called “Prohaska”, they also had a summer house here, and I also remember those very first German tourists,” stated Mladen Juričić Fritz (68), a well-known restaurateur from Rabac for Vecernji, before adding:
“I was eleven years old. It was the summer of 1967, and the tourists slept in my childhood bedroom! They were Germans, at that time, looking at their paying power, they were like spacemen for us locals. When they went home, they would take the whole family with whom they were spending the summer – to dinner! Those were the days. Back during that time, my house was the last one above the road, and today there are hundreds around it, there’s hardly any empty land left for building. There was no road then, only four cars in the village – three white sedans and the neighbour’s blue Opel Rekord. Many years later, I drove my wife Mira to the maternity ward to give birth in it,” revealed Fritz.
He also explained how the miners used to come on holiday to Rabac.
It’s cheerful today in Rabac both during the day and in the evening hours. This area’s strong points are certainly its high-category hotels. There’s even a hotel specially designed for children – Maro. There’s also great food in a number of restaurants. In winter there are maybe 1,500 people living in Rabac, and in summer – there are ten more tourists for every resident.
