The last hotel they built before the world changed
Čikat was invented by a law, a meteorologist and a windbreak. The Alhambra was the final building of that invention, opened in 1912 by the president of the Vienna Hagenbund — and it has almost nothing Moorish about it.
Almost nothing in this photograph is accidental. The pines were planted. The bay was zoned. The buildings arrived in a particular order for a particular reason, between 1895 and 1912, and then they stopped.
A law, June 1892
On 7 June 1892 a state law of the Austrian government in Vienna declared Mali Lošinj and Veli Lošinj climatic health resorts, with health-resort regulations following that September. That is the hinge. Everything on this shoreline is downstream of it.
Three people got it there, and the story is usually told as one. Ambroz Haračić, a professor at the Mali Lošinj maritime school, kept meteorological records from 1879 and published his study of the island’s climate in 1886. Conrad Clar, an Austrian balneologist, came in the winter of 1885 — his son had recovered here from scarlet fever — and wrote the German-language book that carried the news north. Leopold Schrötter von Kristelli, a Viennese internist, supplied what neither of them had: the medical establishment of the capital.
The forest was a windbreak
The pine forest that now sells this place was planted to stop the bura.
The Society for the Afforestation and Beautification of Mali Lošinj was founded in April 1886, and Haračić led the planting. He sold it to residents not as landscape but as a rampart — a natural barrier to shield the town and the harbour from the wind. Several hundred thousand seedlings went in; the sources put the number somewhere between three hundred thousand and half a million.
The tree he chose, Aleppo pine, is not native to Lošinj. It was a pioneer species, picked because it would take. It took. The forest was protected as a park forest in 1992, at somewhere between 221 and 226 hectares, and a forestry paper from February 2026 describes its renewal as stalled — the consensus exists, but bureaucracy, in the author’s words, “remains firm as an impregnable bastion”. A hundred-and-forty-year-old planted forest, ageing, in a country that cannot decide how to replant it.
The year a state law of the Austrian government in Vienna declared both Lošinjs climatic health resorts, on 7 June, with the health-resort regulations following in September. Villa Adelma, the first house on Čikat, went up three years later. The Alhambra, the last, seventeen years after that.
Then the villas, in order
Villa Adelma in 1895, put up by an entrepreneur from Graz — the first on Čikat. Wienerheim around 1899, a sanatorium for sick Viennese students. Villa Carolina the same year, described in the local record as the most lavish on the bay. Seebad Cigale in 1902. Dr Rudolf Hajós’s sanatorium around 1906. The military Kurhaus “Weisses Kreuz” in March 1908. St. Josefsvilla, later Villa Augusta, at about the same time.
And then, in 1912, the Alhambra — and nothing after it. Novi list calls it the last hotel built on Čikat. Two years later the reason why is obvious.
Alfred Keller, and a name that does not fit
The Alhambra was not a villa. It was purpose-built as a hotel and has carried the same name ever since. Its own website says 1908; that is Villa Augusta’s date next door, and it has been propagating through the copy for years. The building was designed and built between 1911 and 1913, and opened in 1912.
The architect was Alfred Keller, born in Graz in 1875, and he was not a minor figure. From 1912 to 1917 — precisely while this was going up — he was president of the Hagenbund, one of the three major secessionist artists’ associations in Vienna. He later served as dean of architecture at the Technische Hochschule, and competed in the 1932 Olympic art competitions.
His Kvarner work is small and nearly all of it is on these islands: a villa and a gallery in Veli Lošinj in 1910, an extension to the Hajós sanatorium a few hundred metres from here, an unbuilt hotel complex on Susak. The Alhambra is the most substantial thing he actually got built on this coast.
And here is the part worth sitting with. He gave a hotel on a Croatian island a Spanish Moorish name, and then designed a building with no Moorish anything in it. Josipa Kranjčević’s study of his Kvarner opus describes eclecticism, historicism and Secession with hints of the modern — ornament avoided, the mass broken into smaller volumes, integration with the landscape ahead of presence. The tourist board’s own description is “Mediterranean villa form, modernistically simple façades”, inspired by Spanish building.
The Secession is next door. Villa Augusta, four years older, has the ornamented façades and the worked balconies. The Alhambra is the plain one with the exotic name.
What 2015 kept
The works ran from November 2014 to August 2015, by ARTA-projektiranje of Zagreb, led by Amira Čaušević, with lighting by Dean Skira. Gross area 8,212 m². The figure of about €25 million covered the Alhambra and Villa Augusta together — though that number is a pre-works projection from a single newspaper, not a closing account.
What they kept: the design, the spatial arrangement and the volumes of both historic buildings, and the original layout of the Alhambra’s public rooms. What they added: a third wing, contemporary, pushed north behind the old ones — the architects call it sickle-shaped, “a form that constantly escapes the view”. The pines stayed in front as a screen, so that the historic buildings keep, in the architects’ phrase, a separate existence in space.
The documented survivals from the original interior are two wooden commodes and one Art Nouveau chandelier. They were restored and put in Villa Augusta.
The hole in the record
I could not establish whether the Alhambra is a protected cultural good.
It is not in any register entry I could reach, no conservation department decision is cited anywhere, and the newspaper coverage of the works does not mention conservators at all. The suppliers call these “heritage structures” without naming a designation. What is definitely protected here is the forest, not the building. That may mean only that the paperwork is not online. It should not be asserted either way, and it is worth someone asking the conservation office in Rijeka directly.
Now
Thirty-six rooms and 15 suites. A restaurant named after the architect, which is a nice piece of manners, holding one Michelin star since 2021 and holding it again in the 2026 guide; it is the only starred restaurant on Lošinj. Daniel Skokić has been executive chef since February 2026. There is a spa with a seawater pool. The hotel belongs to Small Luxury Hotels, and to its Finest Collection since June 2024.
It does not hold a Michelin Key. Appearing in the Michelin guide’s hotel selection is a different and lesser thing, and the two get run together often enough to be worth separating.
Nobody wrote about it
A €25 million restoration of a building by a president of the Hagenbund, and the architecture press did not turn up. I went looking for it, title by title. Nothing.
The only serious writing on the building is Kranjčević’s 2013 study — history, published two years before the restoration. Everything since is travel, trade, or the operator’s own material. There is also no criticism — no conservation dispute, no objection, no critical review. Some of that absence is the same absence: you cannot get a critical reading out of a press that never came.
The pine forest that now sells the place was planted to stop the wind.
Čikat is a manufactured landscape that has had a century and a half to stop looking manufactured, and it has succeeded completely. The forest reads as nature, and the bay reads as somewhere that was always going to be a resort. Both are constructions.
What makes the building interesting is not that it survived — plenty of these survived and are apartments now. It is that a Viennese secessionist gave a Croatian island a Spanish name, and then, having done so, declined to decorate it.
