Brijuni National Park

Brijuni National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

The Brijuni islands lie two kilometres off the Istrian coast opposite the fishing port of Fažana, fifteen minutes north of Pula, and there are two quite different ways of seeing them. The visit proper is the national park's own excursion, booked on the park's website or at its office on the Fažana waterfront: the park boat crosses to Veliki Brijun in fifteen minutes, a guide leads the group, and a tourist train makes a circuit of the island through the safari park, past the Byzantine castrum and the Roman villa bay, with stops at the Tito exhibition and the church of St Germanus, about four hours in all; tickets sell out in July and August and should be bought days ahead.

Visitors who stay in the park's hotels on the island, or who come on the first boat, can rent bicycles or electric golf carts and explore alone, which is the pleasant way. The many boat tours sold from Pula, Fažana, Medulin and Rovinj, the panoramic cruises, glass-bottom boats, swimming trips, sunset cruises with open bars and the dolphin-watching evenings, sail around the archipelago and through its channels without landing on Veliki Brijun; some land on the small island of Sveti Jerolim for a swim. They are agreeable trips on the water, with a fair chance of bottlenose dolphins at dusk, and they are not a visit to the park's sights, so read the description before booking.

Visiting Brijuni National Park: what you will see

The park was declared in 1983 and covers fourteen islands and islets and the sea around them, about thirty-four square kilometres in all, of which the land is seven; Veliki Brijun, the largest, is a low island of holm oak woods, clipped meadows and avenues of pines and cedars that looks like an English landscape park set in the Adriatic. It was made so by the Viennese steel magnate Paul Kupelwieser, who bought the malarial islands in 1893, brought in Robert Koch, the future Nobel laureate, to eradicate the mosquitoes, and built a resort for the Habsburg aristocracy with hotels, a golf course and a harbour. From 1947 to his death in 1980 the islands were the summer residence of Josip Broz Tito, who received some ninety heads of state here, along with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Sophia Loren, and signed the Brioni declaration of the Non-Aligned Movement with Nehru and Nasser in 1956;

the exhibition of photographs, his 1953 Cadillac and the stuffed animals that were diplomatic gifts record those decades. The living gifts and their descendants make up the safari park at the island's northern end, with zebras, zebu, llamas, Istrian oxen and, until her death, the elephant Lanka given by Indira Gandhi; fallow and axis deer and mouflon wander the lawns, and hares and peacocks are everywhere. The antiquities are real and good: a Roman villa of the first century spread around Verige bay with temples, baths and a harbour, the walls of a Byzantine fortified settlement occupied for centuries, the fifteenth-century church of St Germanus with copies of Istrian frescoes and Glagolitic inscriptions, an olive tree some 1,600 years old that still bears, and more than two hundred dinosaur footprints in the limestone of the shore.

Brijuni National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park boats run all year from Fažana, several times a day in summer and two or three in winter, and the guided excursion follows the boat times. May, June and September are the best months, warm enough to swim from the island's beaches and quiet on the train; July and August are hot and full, with the excursions sold out by the day;

from November to March the visit is short, cheap and uncrowded, with the animals and the museum as they are all year. The summer Ulysses theatre performs on Mali Brijun in the old Austrian fort. Allow half a day for the excursion, a full day with a bicycle. Pula's Roman amphitheatre is fifteen minutes from Fažana, Rovinj forty minutes north, and Cape Kamenjak is the wild end of Istria to the south.