by Pádraic Gilligan, Co-Founder, SoolNua Consulting

In the mid distance, across the valley, a ribbon of dense, variegated green connects to a blue sky combed through with wispy strands of white.

Birdsong dominates, broken only by the occasional, delayed din of a car passing on a road I cannot see. A light breeze sets the new growth on the olive trees in front of me dancing. The air is thick and alive with bugs and butterflies.

I’m in Istria, northern Croatia, close to both the Slovenian and Italian borders. Many of the locals we’ve met here have had generations of the same family living in the same house under the flags of Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia and now Croatia. What they share, whatever the flag, is an Istrian DNA, and I’ve spent the past five days trying to decode what that might be.

I’m at San Canzian, a rather unique hospitality offering that breathed new life into a tiny, uninhabited medieval hamlet, painstakingly converting its buildings into an Istrian albergo diffuso, or scattered hotel.

What I didn’t mention earlier is that I’m taking all this in from a baldacchino-style recliner on a lush terrace, an infinity pool at my back. I’m immersed in the raw intensity of nature, yet surrounded by uncompromising five-star luxury. It’s totally authentic and, paradoxically, completely curated, somehow both at once. I don’t think I’ve quite experienced that balance before. I’ve known luxury, but it was luxury too aware of itself, and that self-consciousness undercut it. I’ve had authenticity too, but some of its tastes, smells and textures were almost too hardcore to enjoy.

Maybe this luxury-and-authenticity dialectic is a core element of that Istrian DNA? Or maybe it isn’t a dialectic at all, just a dialogue?

Our guest room is, in effect, the ground floor of an ancient villa, our terrace the kind of outdoor dining space people along the Adriatic have always enjoyed. It feels entirely traditional, down to the cane canopy that shades it. The interior decor and soft furnishings are understated, as is the abstract artwork in our guest room, understated and beautiful and, we’re told, produced entirely by local artists.

The overall design aesthetic here is preservation, but no slave to tradition. A motif of oxidized steel recurs throughout the property, giving it a defiantly contemporary edge. You see it in the signage, in the railings around the swimming pool, in the great sheets of it that frame raised beds spectacularly planted with what feels like infinite rows of lavender and rosemary.

We took a walk to the ruins of San Canzian, a simple Romanesque, 12th-century church that gifts its name to the property. There are helpful signs to get you there, but it still felt wild and undiscovered, hidden behind a dense wall of ash, oak, hawthorn and hornbeam. The gravel pathway is a gauntlet of broom, giant reed, pomegranate and smoke trees, with pops of colour from wildflowers (chicory, wild asparagus, yellow ox-eye) and butterflies. It leads deep into the valley, past small vineyards recently tended, bunches of tiny grapes now hanging beneath the dense foliage.

In stark contrast, dinner at San Canzian is at Luciano, the property’s Michelin Guide restaurant, perched on a southwest-facing terrace high above the valley. When we ate there, the spectacular sunset was almost outdone by a remarkable tasting menu, with wine pairings that our wonderful waiter Marko talked us through. He stressed, with only slightly restrained pride, the local provenance of everything we ate and drank: the homemade focaccia and sourdough, the olive oil from trees we could actually see, the wines from the valley below and the villages next door, the cheeses, the salami, the fish. Impeccable haute cuisine, yet I never once felt awkward or underdressed without a reassuringly expensive jacket.

Maybe the formal-and-informal dialectic is another core element of that Istrian DNA? Or, again, just another meaningful dialogue?

We drove about 10 minutes from San Canzian to visit Grožnjan, Istria’s so-called city of artists, a hilltop village in the Mirna valley that has spent the last sixty years quietly making the case for art over abandonment.

Grožnjan’s story is, in miniature, Istria’s story. First recorded in 1102 under the Patriarchs of Aquileia, it passed to Venice in 1358 and grew into a fortified outpost of the Republic’s eastern defences. Plague emptied it in 1630. The Second World War and the exodus of its Italian-speaking population emptied it again, more thoroughly, and by the 1960s its handsome Venetian houses stood open to the weather, the town all but abandoned.

Then, in 1965, a handful of sculptors and painters, encouraged by the sculptor Aleksandar Rukavina, began moving into the empty houses. Sixty years on, barely 160 people live in Grožnjan full time, but its narrow stone lanes hold something like twenty galleries and studios, and every summer the town fills with young musicians from across Europe, here for its long-running music school. Abandonment and art, another small dialogue inside the larger one.

From Grožnjan, the road, or a much older route if you prefer two wheels to four, drops down into the Mirna valley to meet the Parenzana.

Built in 1902 under the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Parenzana was a narrow-gauge railway running 123km from Trieste to Poreč, carrying coal, salt, wine, olives, soldiers and mail through 33 towns and villages. It operated for just 33 years before closing in 1935, and the towns that had grown rich on its traffic emptied out behind it, the same way Grožnjan did. For decades the line lay derelict. It has since been reborn as a greenway for walkers and cyclists: 13km in Italy, 32km in Slovenia, 78km in Croatia, the old railbed entirely indifferent to the borders that, within living memory, rearranged themselves over the heads of the people who actually lived here.

Which brings me back to where I started. The flags over Istria have changed more often than most: Aquileia, Venice, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia, Croatia. The families have mostly stayed put. The railway that once connected them under one empire now does the same job, on bicycles, under three different governments. San Canzian’s abandoned hamlet transformed into an albergo diffuso, Grožnjan’s empty houses turned into studios, the Parenzana’s rails turned into a cycling trail: three small versions of the same large idea.

Istria’s DNA, then, five days in, only partially decoded: not a place caught between past and present, formal and informal, but one that has learned, again and again, how to hold all at once.

This is the first of a number of posts on Istria – stand by for more! Massive thanks to Denis Ivošević (Managing Director, Istra), Ana and Nevio (Intours, Istria) and Miha Kovoćić for being my guides and teachers over 5 very immersive days.