September the 26th, 2025 – The Croatian Tourism Museum is set to open its doors for free this weekend in beautiful Opatija – a fitting location as the town known as the First Lady of Croatian Tourism.
Opatija dazzles with its unique charm and Austro-Hungarian glam. Its beginnings as Croatia’s first real organised tourism destination are evident, with coastal architecture much more reminiscent of Vienna than Dalmatia or nearby Istria. This Kvarner town stands out and is entirely different when compared to the rest of the country, and it’s obvious why the wealthy residents of the former Austrian Empire adored it so much.
As Novi list writes, on the very apt occasion of World Tourism Day, on Saturday, September the 27th, 2025, the Croatian Tourism Museum in gorgeous Opatija will swing open its doors to all visitors – with free admission throughout the entire day.
The museum’s current exhibition entitled “In the splendour of luxury and elegance: 100 years of the Hotel Esplanade and the Croatian routes of the Orient Express” and the ceremonial hall of Villa Angiolina, which marked the beginning of Opatija’s tourist boom, is the ideal location.
This year’s theme, highlighted by the World Tourism Organisation, is “Tourism and Sustainable Transformation”, which emphasises the sheer importance of tourism as a driver of positive social, cultural and economic change. For more than forty-five years now, this day has been celebrated across the world to promote awareness of the impact of tourism on the development of all kinds of different communities.
Located in the stunning and historic Villa Angiolina, the Croatian Tourism Museum is a truly unique museum institution in the Croatian sense, founded only in 2007. Through sixteen different thematic collections and more than 9,500 displayed objects, the museum documents and interprets the development of tourism across Croatia – from its beginnings back during the 19th century to all of the contemporary tourism practices we know today. Opatija, as the cradle of Croatian tourism, is an absolutely ideal place for this story to be told, with the Croatian Tourism Museum offering a wide variety of exhibitions and programmes that bring the spirit of bygone times back to life.
This weekend, the focus will be firmly placed on history and development of two Croatian symbols of luxury, which also double up as symbols of European tourism – the Hotel Esplanade in Zagreb and the most famous train in the world, the Orient Express.
In the first part of the exhibition at Opatija’s Croatian Tourism Museum, visitors will have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the story of Zagreb’s dazzling Hotel Esplanade, which, for a full hundred years now, has been a symbol of high end service, elegance and the urban spirit of the capital.
The second part of the exhibition takes visitors on the trail of the most famous train of all time – the Orient Express, which first departed from the Paris railway station back in 1883, bound for what was Constantinople at the time. The exhibition also reveals previously unknown insights into the initiative of the Zagreb Chamber of Commerce and Crafts to design a new Orient Express route back in 1906.
New insights into the connection between the legendary train and Opatija in the late 19th and early 20th centuries will also be delved into. The exhibition features numerous exhibits and archival materials from both private collectors and Croatian and international institutions, revealing the broader context of tourism and travel, with a special emphasis placed on Croatian regions and their role in the wider European story.
