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Every summer as I travel the Adriatic highway north towards Slovenia, I’ve passed a town outside the bigger city of Rijeka that has caught my attention. The town is named Bakar, and it’s very cute, crowned by a castle, and huddling in one corner of a lovely bay. However, this cute town suffered during communist times from the terrible blight of having a giant coal plant plopped right down on the bay. So I’ve long wondered about Bakar and its history… and this is the story.

Though it seems small today, with a population of about 1500 people, Bakar was once a major Adriatic port town. It started small, of course, probably settled by Illyrian tribes in the few centuries before Christ. The Illyrians may have tried to mine copper in the area–and in fact, one theory of how Bakar gets its name is from the minerals in the neighborhood, since “bakar” means “copper” in Croatian.

Bakar only began to bloom, though, in the Middle Ages. The town belonged to one of the two most important noble families in Croatian history, the Zrinski family. In the Middle Ages and through the Renaissance, the Zrinskis were almost like regional kings, so vast were their holdings. Their lands stretched from what is today Hungary all the way to Bakar on the sea, and in one area their estates were strung together consecutively over a distance of 200 kilometers.

Under the Zrinskis, Bakar developed into one of the most important ports in the northern Adriatic. For decades it was the main outlet to the sea for the joint Hungarian-Croatian kingdom. Ships carrying salt, timber, olive oil, wax, skins, as well as books constantly came and went from Bakar’s harbor. Particularly in the later 1500s, once the Ottoman invasion of the Balkans had cut off many of the overland routes from more southerly Adriatic ports, Bakar’s dominance over trade increased. Even the great maritime republic of Ragusa (known today as Dubrovnik), Venice’s long-time rival in the Adriatic, ended up using Bakar as an outlet for commerce. Bakar’s main competitor at this time was Rijeka, the port just a few kilometers to the north.

By the end of the 1600s, though, Bakar’s star began to fade. One factor in its decline was the demise of the Zrinski family, which was largely wiped out by the Habsburgs after a conspiracy instigated by the Zrinskis to free Croatia from Habsburg rule. As part of that conspiracy, Petar Zrinski actually invited Louis XIV to land armies at Bakar for an invasion of Croatia that would make Louis the new king! Even once it lost its aristocratic patrons, Bakar was still a notable town. According to the 1787 census, for example, Bakar had a population of 7600 people, more than competitor Rijeka’s 6000. Bakar in those days in fact dwarfed Zagreb, the present-day capital, which in 1787 had only 3000 people; today Zagreb counts nearly a million.

The nineteenth century, though, brought two detrimental developments to Bakar. One was the rise of steamships. Bakar had been a significant shipbuilding center, but that was for sailing ships, which quickly became obsolete in the face of commercial shipping powered by steam. Then, in 1883, the railway connecting the coast to the interior bypassed Bakar: it went to Rijeka instead, thus ensuring Rijeka’s growth into the major industrial port of Austria-Hungary.

So Bakar entered a period of slow decline. The truly toxic development, however, that was nearly the nail in the town’s coffin, came in the 1970s, when communist Yugoslavia decided to build the coal plant in the harbor. This plant, together with the nearby oil refinery, brought serious environmental damage to Bakar’s bay. The damage became apparently quickly. For centuries the people of Bakar had produced a sparkling wine, Bakarska vodica, that was all but killed off by the coal plant’s pollution. The bay had once supported a sizeable tuna fishery as well, but that industry also died out as the water became contaminated and tuna were over-fished.

Seeing this giant coal plant in such a lovely bay, and located so near such a charming little town, was pretty monstrous, as I can attest. I couldn’t find any pictures of the plant, so you’ll have to take my word for it. The good news is that in 1995, after twenty years of operation, the plant was dismantled. Today there are big, barren fields right by the water where the whole industrial complex once sat, but fortunately the real eyesore is gone.

So now, after the tough economic times of the 1990s, the citizens of Bakar are trying to decide how to climb back on the road to prosperity. There’s a push for increased tourism, but there are also ideas for expanding some (less invasive) industrial development nearby. Bakar will probably never regain the prominent status it once had. But I bet in the coming years the town will be spruced up–even though the road still passes it by, since the new Adriatic superhighway perches on the hills far above. My advice is to get off the superhighway and head down to the water, and check out this charming little seaside down that has seen some glory days and some dark days in its more than 800 year history.