Excuse me… Austrian Riviera?  Surely not: Austria is a landlocked country and quite a long way from the sea. That’s true today but it hasn’t always been the case.

The coastal area in the northern end of the Adriatic stretching through modern-day Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy has an extraordinarily complex history, but from 1524 until 1918 much of it was ruled by Hapsburg monarchs of what became the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, a strip of coastline was transformed into a fashionable resort district known as the Austrian Riviera when a new railway line opened linking Vienna directly to the Adriatic.   The temperate climates – average temperatures of 10 °C in winter, and 32 °C in summer – soon encouraged Habsburg high society to build elegant fin-de-siècle private villas and some extremely grand seaside hotels  all surrounded by  exotic, ands well manicured greenery.

Amazingly, despite political upheavals and wars, many of them still exist.

 

The images in this post, unless otherwise acknowledge come from the website or exhibitions at the Croatian Museum Tourism in the Villa Angiolina 

Frequent boundary changes in the last couple of hundred years have often switched ownership of the region between different powers, with accompanying renaming of towns. I have just spent a few days in the area and visited the town where the Austrian Riviera really got underway: Opatija, now in Croatia.  Way back in the mid-19thc century it was known by its Italian name Abbazia and it  was there in 1844 that Iginio Scarpa, a wealthy merchant from nearby Rijeka  [then called Fiume], bought a large stretch of land and commissioned a seaside mansion in what was described as  the Adriatic Biedermeier style, which he named the Villa Angiolina after his wife.

The area was then simply laurel groves, or terraced fields with olives, figs and vines.  Some of that feel was retained because a later description of  Scarpa’s garden said  there were ” a labyrinth of paths through the densest, naturally growing laurel woodland, where even on hot summer days cool breezes blow and the pleasant shade is only rarely penetrated by the rays of the sun.” It was also full of unusual plants because Scarpa was a  passionate plant collector and used the parkland around the villa to create a private botanical garden importing exotic plants from all over the world, including bamboo, cypresses from the Himalayas, cedars from the Atlas Mountains, Sequoia, Magnolias and camellias.

The camellias arrived  through the good offices of Adolph Terscheck, gardener to the King of Saxony. In 1801 as an apprentice at the royal garden in Pillnitz he had transplanted a small camellia from a greenhouse into the open air  where it flourished and is now thought to be the oldest camellia in Europe. The king asked for cuttings which he could use as presents and in 1845 gave one  to Guglielmo Sartorio who had been Saxony’s consul in Trieste for nearly 40 years.  Sartorio gave it to his brother-in-law who just happened to be Iginio Scarpa.  Camellias have flourished at the Villa Angiolini ever since and have become the floral symbol of modern day Opatija, with a camellia show held there every spring.

The mid-19th century saw the beginnings of  the age of the  railway, and in 1857 the first through train ran from Vienna to Trieste, then the main port of the Austrian Empire. Another line opened in 1873 linking Fiume [now Rijeka]  and Abbazia to the main network and, despite the fact it took about 13 hours from Vienna,  this opened the way for a boom in tourism.

In 1882, the railway company bought  the Villa Angiolina, with the idea of the of establishing a health resort. However “it is intended that the villa should continue to be rented only as a complete residence”  and so was ” generally reserved for the accommodation of persons of the highest rank.”

“During recent months it has housed His Imperial and Royal Highness Field Marshal Archduke Albrecht, who stayed here for some time in order to test the beneficial effects of Abbazia’s wonderfully mild air, and who was graciously pleased to express the greatest satisfaction with his stay.” So too did  the heir to the Austrian throne, Crown Prince Rudolf  [later of Mayerling fame] and his wife Stephanie.

These stays bought Abbazia considerable attention and boosted by that,  the railway company began building two massive seafront hotels: Hotel Quarnero (now the Kvarner Hotel) which opened in 1884  and the Hotel Kronprinzessin Stephanie (now the Hotel Imperial) which followed in 1885. But the company did not stop with the buildings.

Just as at the Villa Angiolina the hotels were set in splendid gardens, and faced the lungomare a new promenade built between 1885 and 1911 that, unlike most British equivalents,  closely hugged the shape of the coastline.  Tourism boomed and included regular visits by the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I and his wife Elizabeth.

The gardens of the Villa Angiolina were redesigned in 1883 followed by  those of the  new hotels which were laid out in 1884-6,  by  Carl Schubert, Director of the Imperial and Royal Horticultural Society in Vienna. [By way of explanation of his rather odd title –  Franz Joseph was both Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary] who published a catalogue of the plants they contained.  This was dedicated to “the founder and creator of Austria’s only seaside resort, the promoter of horticulture at Abbazia, the Director-General of the Imperial and Royal Privileged Southern Railway Company, Friedrich Julius Schuler”.

Interestingly, as Schubert goes on to explain in his short preface to the catalogue, it wasn’t just the sea that made Abbazia attractive. Rising steeply behind it Monte Maggiore  was “rich in an abundance of magnificent vegetation, which demonstrates the advantages of its location better than any thermometer readings or calculations of average annual temperatures could do.”

One of the most immediate impressions one has today of the gardens is that, apart from a small section now called St James’s Park, they have very few flower beds and instead are, as they were in Scarpa’s day,  largely planted with evergreen trees and shrubs. This was a deliberate policy continued by Schubert who insisted in using  “only those capable of enduring the winters there when planted outdoors in the open ground without protection. In keeping with its purpose as a southern winter health resort, the fresh, beautiful, luxuriant green foliage was intended to delight the eyes of the visitor and present his mind with an incomparable scene: from these enchanting gardens, over flowering azaleas, camellias and rhododendrons in the winter months, he could look towards the snow-covered mountains of the Croatian coastal region.” Of course thick plantings of evergreens like this also helped the gardens cool during the heat of summer. I discovered too that another way of doing that was to bring down blocks of ice  from Alpine glaciers and place them around the park’s stone benches.

An 1894 article about Abbazia then sums up what happened next ” Private speculation immediately seized upon the green coastline as well. Following the Southern Railway’s example, people began to appreciate all the advantages of this coast which previously nobody had noticed. Villa after villa, pension after pension arose, and with a sigh the dryads who had guarded so many crowns of the sacred laurel had to descend to earth whenever the clearing axe arrived to fell the brown-barked trunks.” But its clear there was concern about overdevelopment and in 1892 the railway company which still owned all the land issued an order  allowing new buildings only  if they were detached and with their main facade facing seawards and surrounded by greenery. 

 

By this point Abbazia had become an officially recognised health resort, with twelve sanatoria and sixty-two registered physicians and the number continued to rise.

Alongside the construction of hotels and health establishments, there were facilities for open-air bathing, kiosks bandstands and music pavilions, all well landscaped with plenty of planting.

By 1899  Geuter’s guide to Abbazia shows that the park around Villa Angiolina were expanded and together with the other villa and hotel gardens soon  covered ” the whole peninsula between the steamer harbour and the boat harbour on the one side, and between the seashore and the Imperial Road running above the coast on the other.”

It goes on to describe the villa’s grounds in some detail. There was ” a flower-filled parterre, bounded at the front by the viewing terrace, on the right by the music pavilion, and on the left by a densely overgrown labyrinth traversed by numerous paths; the whole is framed by magnificent evergreen trees and shrubs” which included  “a group of palms and other exotic plants…and leafy arches of Japanese aucuba.” From the viewing terrace “there was an extensive prospect over the sea while near the music pavilion stood an enormous oak whose branches extended far out over the sea, beneath which was a particularly picturesque resting place.”

Elsewhere in the park was “the Swiss House” where there was  a ” deliberate juxtaposition of northern and southern plants: dwarf mountain pine and spruce with magnolias and strawberry tree; oak with laurel; hawthorn with camphor tree.”

Geuter ends his account  enthusiastically: “The park is indisputably one of the most beautiful and varied gardens in Europe, its magnificent situation resembling an emerald jewel beside the surging gulf.”

Not everyone agreed – at least in the early days. Amongst the first British visitors were the great Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton and his wife Isabel.   He was the British consul in Trieste and they decided to spend 3 winter/spring months at the Hotel Kronprinzessin Stephanie in 1888 to enjoy a bit of rest and relaxation at this new apparently paradisiacal health spa resort.

Unfortunately the weather was (abnormally) bad for much of his stay: “During the persistent drenching rains, walks are confined perforce to the house galleries and the few square yards of gravelled park. The clay roads are impassable. There is no covered Wandelbahn as in the Austrian Bäder, no glassed-in promenoir as in the Swiss establishments, and no Cursalon for general meeting, except a frowzy coffee room of small dimensions in the smaller hotel, called “Quarnero” which reeks with bad tobacco and which expects you to  ‘consume’ “.

Next  the rain turned to heavy snow: which “weighed down the boasted laurel-groves, breaking the stems and branches by the dozen, and at the rare intervals when the sun shone, they made earth sloppy and muddy and miry as any bog-trotter could desire.”

Moreover, “the little inside world was as miserable as the outside.”

The town was cut off: “water supply was cut off by the freezing of the pipes and as Abbazia procures all her supplies, even of ‘dairy’  from Vienna, via the railway, café au lait and tea became impossible luxuries.”

Nor was it cheap: “The Südbahn [railway] has spent its money far too freely, and the outlay must be recouped from us, the public. The prices are those of Vienna and Budapest, and dearer than London and Paris: …we found all our expenses at least doubled and often trebled.”

Worse still, he reported elsewhere that although he had been Consul at Trieste for fifteen years, “they refused to take my cheque, because ‘they did not know who ‘Coutts’ was.”

The health cure also came in for criticism. “Setting aside the deadly dulness which overhangs the little world like a funeral pall, arrangements for the patient, as he is very properly called, are of the very worst. Meals brought up to the sick room begin by paying an extra 25 per cent. The service for the invalid is vile, on all but the ground-floor, where the maids and waiters love to congregate. They have no regard for time, so important to an invalid stomach, and after half an hour’s hard ringing they bring up tepid soup without spoons, half cooked dishes without forks or salt and wine or water without glasses. In fact, if there is a slovenly or ill-tempered waiter in the house, he is told off to wait upon the sick upstairs and is not allowed to show himself below.

Sanitation was by means of cesspits in the internal courtyards and stank. When they were cleaned out “the Stephanie, for a day or two, becomes fouler than the worst hospital of the prescientific age: the stench is such that none but the strongest of stomachs can withstand it, …At such seasons the medical adviser should strongly urge a two day’s flitting from Abbazia; far better are the discomforts of that most wretched one-horse harbour town of Fiume than wholesale poisoning at the ” Health Resort.” Lady Isabel also complained  that:  “we one and all fell ill in consequence of the horrible drains in the main courtyard of the Stephanie Hotel.”

It was also a snobbish society : “Germany proper and Austria-Hungary are now the only empires in Europe which support an exclusive aristocracy, separated by birth and breeding from the surging tide of democracy which is raging around them. But all these families of ancient and historic name are more or less cousins, and no stranger can find his way into their society, and much less into their intimacy, unless he be firstly a Catholic, and secondly a connection by marriage…

The sprinkling of aristocracy  eats together, drives together, lives together, and only sees the second division. The latter is a large class of respectable, decent, inoffensive people, professionals, commercials and others, who go simply to cure, or to enjoy themselves, and do not think about society one way or the other.

And lastly there is an unpleasant little leaven of foreigners”

In short he concludes  “Abbazia will, in a few years, become, not only all they pretend it
is now, but all it really ought to be. Nature’s materials are there, but there is as yet no competency, no savoir faire to make use of them. And we do not recommend people to go there, in fact we strongly dissuade them from so doing until the place is formed upon the principle that it ought to be, and as we may add, it could be, by a mere turn of the wheel.”

It’s much better today!

There are of course other parks in the town, not all of them easily reachable in a few minutes walk from the sea or the town centre. I was going to try and include some of them but I don’t have space and most of them date from after 1900 when the Austrian Riviera was well established.  I’ll leave you to follow them up yourselves if you are interested. The town’s tourist site gives brief introductions to some of them.

For more information the obvious place to start is the town’s tourism site, but unfortunately like most of the other websites that cover the gardens it’s simply a repetition of the same few facts. There’s also travelpotpourri  a good travel blog which has a detailed and well-illustrated account of the various gardens. The early guide books are in German but most accessible on-line, with the best probably being Lose Blätter aus Abazia by the Archduke Ludwig Salvator, which was published in 1886 and has a large number of sketches of the resort.  There is also a report on the conservation and management of the historic gardens in the area, although unfortunately the English translation is far from perfect.