Bakar Old Town

Twelve kilometres east of Rijeka, at the head of a spectacular flooded karst valley, the old town of Bakar tumbles down the hillside in tiers of stone houses toward what was for centuries one of the most important shipbuilding harbours of the eastern Adriatic. Its landmark is the Frankopan Castle (14th century), a tall trapezoidal keep that now hosts a small municipal museum and offers panoramic views over the bay and the huge — and famously polluting — 20th-century industrial harbour on the far shore. That juxtaposition of medieval hilltop and heavy industry is part of Bakar's melancholy charm: the town declined dramatically after the coke plant opened in 1978, and though the plant has now been decommissioned, the emptied lower town has an atmospheric, faintly Balkan quiet. Wander up through the alleys to the parish church of St. Andrew (1493), stop at the tiny Turkish House museum with its beautiful 17th-century Ottoman ceiling (Bakar was the westernmost point of Ottoman diplomatic contact), and finish at the terrace of Konoba Kula for the sunset view. Bakar is famous throughout Croatia for one specific dessert: bakarska torta, a rich walnut-and-Maraschino sponge invented locally in the 1830s and still baked by two elderly families in town. Come on a Sunday morning; it is otherwise very quiet.