Brseč Village

Perched on a 157-metre cliff overhanging the sea between Mošćenička Draga and the Istrian border, tiny Brseč is one of those Kvarner villages where time visibly slowed down around 1900 and never really restarted. Fewer than a hundred people live in its walled medieval core, a knot of stone houses grouped around the church of St. Mary Magdalene with its distinctive detached bell tower. The village was the birthplace of Eugen Kumičić (1850–1904), one of Croatia's great realist novelists, and his childhood home is marked with a plaque near the main square. A short waymarked footpath drops from the village to a series of unspoilt pebble coves at the base of the cliff — allow forty minutes down, an hour back up in the heat — where snorkelling among posidonia meadows can turn up octopus, moray eels and vast schools of salema. Back in the village, the terrace at Konoba Zora catches the afternoon light for one of the great sunset panoramas of the Kvarner: the sea, the island of Cres directly opposite, and on very clear evenings the ridgeline of Velebit far to the east. Free parking outside the walls; the interior is entirely pedestrian and best explored on a slow midweek morning.