Every year people pack the beaches down in Novi Vinodolski, sweating under umbrellas and fighting for parking near the ice cream shops. If you turn the wheel the other way—up past Donji Zagon on that narrow, single-lane road climbing into the hills—the noise drops off almost immediately.
I ended up driving up to Gornji Zagon on a Tuesday afternoon just to get away from the heat. On paper, it's still listed as a settlement. In reality, there's nobody left living up here full time.
The road just sort of peters out into loose gravel among a scattering of old stone houses. Most of them are completely roofless now, the wooden beams having given way decades ago. Brambles and wild figs are growing right out of the old living rooms, and the silence is heavy except for the cicadas buzzing in the scrub oak.
"It’s strange walking through a place where everything is built to last—thick dry-stone walls, heavy lintels—yet there hasn't been a kettle boiled or a door locked in ages."
It didn't happen overnight, of course. Like a lot of the smaller hamlets tucked away in the Croatian hinterlands, people simply moved down toward the coast for work and easier roads back in the sixties and seventies. Once the last few older residents passed away or packed up, the village just quietly went back to nature.
Wandered around for an hour or so. Found an old iron plow half-buried in high grass behind one of the barns, and a communal stone cistern with the top cracked open, completely dry inside. You can still trace out the old garden terraces on the slope where they used to farm, though the brush has taken most of it back.
If you go up there, watch your step around the doorways and watch out for snakes in the rubble walls during summer. Otherwise, it's just a quiet, slightly strange place to sit on a stone wall and watch the heat shimmering over the ridge.