The Adriatic Club

This was supposed to be a leg-stretch. I was driving down from northern Italy toward the south of Croatia, and Krk is barely off the road — over the bridge, ten minutes, and you’re at the coast. Twenty minutes, I thought. Get out of the car, look at the famous ruin, drive on.

I was there for an hour and I did not see half of it.

That is the thing nobody tells you about this place: the scale. You park, and the first thing you meet is a concrete pergola over a terrace with trees growing up through it, and you think, fine, this is the ruin. It isn’t. It’s an outbuilding. Behind it the ground steps down toward the water in terrace after terrace, all going back to scrub, and off to one side there’s a whole separate block, and behind that the main hotel — four storeys, a deep grid of loggias running the entire face of it, the sort of building that only makes sense if you imagine it full.

Then you find the hall. A room the size of a small church, mushroom columns fanning out overhead, a lattice roof still holding most of its glass, and set into the floor in the middle a great circular pool. Everything in it is smashed. The pool is a bowl of rubble now, and every surface up to about shoulder height is spray paint.

Definitely worth the stop. A huge complex — and heavily decayed.

What it was

I read about it properly afterwards, in the car. It opened in 1972, designed by Boris Magaš, and the money behind the casino was Bob Guccione’s — Penthouse. They called it the Penthouse Adriatic Club: a members’ club on the Adriatic, aimed squarely at Western high rollers, operating inside socialist Yugoslavia. It is a genuinely strange thing to have existed and it did not last: the casino was gone within about a year. The hotel itself went on for decades after that, sheltered refugees during the nineties, got privatised, and then simply stopped.

Knowing that doesn’t change what’s standing there. If anything it makes the wreckage read worse, because a building that was cheaply made would have an excuse. This one was not cheaply made. The concrete work is careful — the coffered soffits, the cranked stairs, the way the terraces are cut into the slope — and it has been stripped, burned, tagged and rained into for a quarter of a century.

I stayed until the light went. At ten past seven the sun dropped behind Istria across the bay and the whole complex went the colour of the concrete, and I walked back across a car park sized for a crowd that stopped coming decades ago.

Worth the stop. Just not twenty minutes.