Can Croatia revive its naturism glory days amid booming tourism?

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Croatia’s naturism “glory days” are being challenged, but it is still positioned to survive through smaller, higher-end facilities and continued demand from a limited nudist visitor base.

Croatia’s naturist tradition is long-running, with the first commercial naturist camp, Koversada, opening in 1961 and nudism on the Adriatic coast dating back to the 1930s on the island of Rab. Yet the number of nudist camps has fallen from 34 in the mid-1980s to nine today, while naturism has struggled to attract younger followers even as Croatia’s tourism has rebounded. Even so, with nearly 19 million tourists visiting a country of 4.2 million people in the past year and an estimated 300,000 nudists, Croatia still has a large pool of potential visitors, including an estimated 10 per cent of tourists who occasionally swim naked.
Koversada’s scale shows how much has changed since the peak
Koversada, the largest naturist camp off Croatia’s northwestern Istria peninsula, covers about 100 hectares (nearly 250 acres) and can host around 5,000 guests at a time in tents, camping vans, or apartments. That is far below the camp’s heyday in the 1980s, when up to 15,000 campers could be booked in during summer. At the camp, guests are generally naked outdoors but are requested to be dressed inside restaurants or shops, reflecting a controlled approach to nudity in public spaces.
The decline has multiple timeline markers, starting in the late 1980s
Croatia had 34 nudist camps by the mid-1980s, leading the market alongside France and Germany, but that number dropped to nine over time. The decline began in the late 1980s as other European countries opened their own naturist facilities and naturism became less attractive globally. The 1990s independence war also badly hit Croatia’s tourism, even though loyal nudists continued to summer in Istria, which was spared the violence.
Younger interest is weaker even as tourism grows
At Koversada, the clientele is generally aged over 40, and camp management has said naturism is simply not sufficiently attractive for younger generations compared with how it was for their parents. The broader industry focus has shifted toward “textile camps,” where people keep their clothes on, while naturism remains a smaller share of overall tourism. This mismatch between a booming tourism market and a narrower nudist audience is central to why reviving past “glory days” is difficult.
“Boutique nudism” and upgrades like Valalta’s investments are the current path
Experts point to a future in small, high-end, privately run facilities rather than large corporate camps, framing “boutique naturism” as a possible niche. Valalta, another nudist camp in Istria, has invested in apartments, beaches, and children’s attractions to stay relevant, and it has been named annually since 2013 among Europe’s best campsites by Germany’s largest auto club, ADAC. With estimates of nearly 19 million visitors last year and around 300,000 nudists—mostly Germans, Slovenes, Austrians and Dutch—plus at least 10 per cent of tourists who occasionally swim naked, Croatia still has measurable demand to build on, even if it is not returning to past scale.

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Can Croatia revive its naturism glory days amid booming tourism?

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