October 8, 2018 – Continuing our look at the Mediterranean as it once was through online videos of yesterday, a journey back to the island of Rab.
Idyllic island life in the summer of 1934 – some wonderful footage from the island of Rab.
It was taken just two years before the arrival of a rather famous visitor, whose antics on Rab would give birth to a new type of tourism on the Adriatic coast – naturism.
In 1936, the abdicating British king Edward VIII sailed into Rab with married lover Wallace Simpson, and after a typically splendid Rab lunch, they asked permission to bathe naked in Kandarola Bay. Permission was granted, and that royal skinny dipping is often referred to as the birth of naturist tourism in Croatia, which exploded in popularity in the 1960s, and which remains an important part of Croatian tourism today.