Explore The Kvarner Gulf
A perfectly preserved, late medieval Adriatic settlement squeezed onto a slender peninsula, RAB TOWN is famous for the quartet of Romanesque campaniles that run along its Old Town’s central ridge. It’s a genuinely lovely place: a tiny grey-and-ochre city, enlivened with splashes of green palm, huddles of leaning junipers and sprigs of olive-coloured cacti which push their way up between balconied palaces. The population today is only a third of what it was in Rab’s fourteenth-century heyday, although it’s swelled significantly by the influx of summer visitors, who create a lively holiday atmosphere without overly compromising the town’s medieval character.
The Old Town divides into two parts: Kaldanac, the oldest quarter, at the end of the peninsula, and Varoš, which dates from between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Together they make up a compact and easily explored grid of alleyways traversed by three parallel thoroughfares: Donja (Lower), Srednja (Middle) and Gornja (Upper) ulice.
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Rab and the Royal tackle
Rab and the Royal tackle
Rab’s long-standing status as a naturist centre – the Frkanj peninsula just west of town was established as one of the first naturist resorts in Europe – was popularized by the visit of British King Edward VIII (accompanied by future wife Wallis Simpson) in the summer of 1936. Whether Edward actually got the royal tackle out or not remains the subject of much conjecture, but his stay on Rab provided the inspiration for a recent Croatian musical, Kralj je gol (literally “The King is Naked”, although in colloquial Croatian it means much the same thing as the expression “The Emperor’s New Clothes”). After visiting Rab, Edward and Wallis continued down the Adriatic aboard a luxury yacht packed with sundry toffs and royal hangers-on. Pursued by Europe’s press, the trip turned into the celebrity media-fest of its day, with thousands of locals lining the streets to ogle the couple when they came ashore at Šibenik, Split and Dubrovnik. The only journalists who failed to follow the cruise were the British – the idea that their monarch was romancing an American divorcee was too mind-bogglingly scandalous to report.
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Rabska torta
Rabska torta
Widely available in local shops and cafes, Rab’s deliciously sweet rabska torta (“Rab cake”) is really more of a pie than a cake, consisting of marzipan wrapped in sugary dough that is part pastry, part biscuit. Vilma (w rabskatorta.com) and Kiflić are the main local producers and their recipes are rather different – thereby providing you with a perfect excuse to try them both.
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The Rapska fjera
The Rapska fjera
Rab’s biggest annual event is the Rapska fjera festival, a three-day gala comprising St James’s Day (July 25), St Anne’s Day (July 26) and St Christopher’s Day (July 27). Taking a traditional fourteenth-century holiday as its cue, the town literally reverts to the Middle Ages – six hundred participants don home-made costumes to re-create the olden times with games, dances, traditional cooking and other cultural events. Street stalls, processions, knightly tournaments and crossbow competitions are the cornerstones of the programme, and with thousands of visitors pouring into town to celebrate, there’s no more invigorating time to be on the island.
