Somewhere around the second morning of a beach holiday, a familiar instinct kicks in. Get down early, lay a towel on the good spot in the shade, walk back up for breakfast, return at ten to a place that is still yours. Plenty of people were taught that this is simply how it is done.
In Pirovac it will get your towel driven away in a truck. Fifteen minutes down the coast in Tribunj, it will get you a bill.
What happened on the Pirovac beaches on 31 July
On the last day of July the municipal company Vrilo, together with communal and maritime wardens, worked along the town’s beaches and collected every towel, sunlounger and bag that had been left unattended to hold a place. All of it went into the back of a small truck and off the beach.
The rule being enforced is a single sentence: leaving towels, sunloungers and other personal belongings unattended in order to reserve a spot on the beach is not allowed.
The reasoning behind it is worth understanding, because it explains why this is not a passing crackdown. A Croatian beach is pomorsko dobro — maritime public property. It is not owned by the town, the hotel behind it or the café on it. The town’s position is that it should therefore be equally available to whoever actually turns up to use it, resident or visitor, and that a towel laid out at seven in the morning by somebody who is at that moment asleep is not use.
Nor was this a one-off. It was described plainly as another round of an ongoing effort against people who keep doing it.
Tribunj is stricter, and there it costs money
About fifteen minutes down the coast, Tribunj has taken the same principle and written it into its communal order with a number attached. Reserving beach space there carries a fine of up to €260.
The retrieval process is the part guests find genuinely startling. The wardens collect your things, and you can have them back — but only in exchange for your personal details, which are then used to post you a payment slip for unauthorised use of maritime public property. Croatian coverage of it put the matter neatly: your towel is waiting for you, and so is the invoice.
Tribunj has been running these sweeps for several summers now, so nobody there is improvising.
It is not a local grudge
If this reads as two small towns being difficult, it is worth knowing that they are firmly in the mainstream. Medulin and Novi Vinodolski also fine beach reservation. Baška on Krk and Podgora on the Makarska riviera send crews out early in the morning to gather up whatever was left overnight. The practice has simply run out of patience on this coast, and the towns along Pirovac Bay are enforcing a national norm rather than inventing a local one.
How to actually get a good spot
Turn up and stay. Obvious, but it is the whole answer. The rule is not aimed at people sitting on the beach at eight in the morning. It is aimed at unattended objects.
Or go late instead. This is the better trick, and it is what people who live here do. The sea is at its warmest in the late afternoon, the light is far kinder, and a good deal of the beach empties out around five o’clock as families head off to eat. Arriving at four rather than nine solves the problem by walking around it.
Never leave anything overnight. Not a lounger, not a windbreak, not a folded umbrella tucked behind a rock. Overnight items are exactly what the morning sweeps are looking for, and they are the least likely to come back to you quietly.
If your things do vanish, they were not stolen. Ask at the town’s communal service. In Pirovac that is Vrilo. Expect a conversation rather than a simple handover, and in Tribunj expect to give your name.
Chase the shade, not the square metre. The genuinely scarce thing on a Dalmatian beach in August is a pine tree, not a patch of pebbles. Work out where the shade will be at two in the afternoon rather than where it is at nine in the morning, and you will care much less about arriving first.
The short version
Croatian beaches are public property, and you cannot hold a piece of one with an object. In Pirovac an unattended towel gets picked up and taken away. In Tribunj it gets picked up and you get a payment slip for up to €260. Carry your towel down with you, carry it home again, and choose your hour rather than your spot.
None of this makes the beaches here hard work. Every beach we would send you to is within a walk of the house, and the roadworks finished through Pirovac this summer added a cantilevered stretch of pavement along the Adriatic Highway, so the footpath now runs unbroken the length of the town. For where to point yourselves once you get down there, we have written separately about the beaches around Pirovac, and about day trips out to Murter and the Kornati when you would rather be on the water than beside it.