2 stops in walking order

Museum

In an elegant 19th-century palazzo on Mali Lošinj's harbour, an entire museum has been built around a single object: the bronze Apoxyomenos, a life-size Hellenistic statue of an athlete scraping oil from his skin, pulled from the seabed off the tiny island of Vele Orjule in 1999. Dating to the 2nd or 1st century BC, it is the best-preserved Greek bronze in the world — better than the celebrated Riace warriors — because it lay for two thousand years upright and undisturbed in oxygen-poor sediment. The award-winning museum, opened in 2016, choreographs the visit as a slow theatrical sequence: seven rooms of increasing intimacy — a rest room with restful ambient light, a preparation room, a room devoted to the recovery — before you finally enter a soft-lit chamber where the athlete stands alone, life-size, achingly human. The whole visit takes 45 minutes to an hour and repays going slowly. Explanatory panels are excellent in English and Croatian, and a small final room shows underwater documentary footage of the recovery. Mali Lošinj's palm-lined harbour outside is one of the loveliest in the Kvarner; time your visit for late afternoon so you emerge into the aperitivo hour.

~1 h at this stop

Island

Lošinj was 'discovered' by Austrian doctors in the 1880s as an air-cure destination — the concentration of aromatic Mediterranean plants (over 1,100 species) creates an unusually healing atmosphere, and the island still markets itself as an official 'Island of Vitality.' Mali Lošinj's colourful harbour is Croatia's largest island town by population; Čikat Bay just west is fringed with belle-époque villas hidden in pine forest. Dolphin-watching trips leave from the harbour.

~20 min at this stop