Sixteen marinas in under three years

The number moves depending on who is telling it. Sixteen marinas in eighteen months, say two accounts. Three years, says a third. The encyclopaedia puts the building between 1984 and 1986. What nobody disputes is the starting point: at the beginning of the 1980s the entire Croatian coast had ten marinas and roughly two thousand berths in the water.

And what nobody disputes is why. The programme was not a tourism idea that happened to involve boats. It was a foreign-currency idea that happened to involve tourists.

A hard-currency programme

Yugoslavia entered the 1980s short of foreign currency. The proposal that became Adriatic Club Yugoslavia turned that shortage into a plan: build marinas, attract foreign boat owners who pay in Deutschmarks, and let the companies that need those Deutschmarks help finance the build in exchange for access to them.

The idea is credited to Veljko Barbieri, who became the club’s first director. Its political weight came from Ante Marković — then head of the Croatian executive council, previously the director of Rade Končar, and a man who thought about tourism the way he thought about exports. INA lent against future currency; working organisations carried the rest. Sources disagree on how many there were, so we do not give a number.

ACY was founded on 1 July 1983, with its seat in Opatija.

What that bought

Sixteen marinas. The first three — Vodice, Jezera and Skradin — opened within 120 days. The design work ran through INA Projekt with a team of forty-odd; the underwater and foundation work went to Institut IGH. The brand identity was drawn by Roberta di Camerino, an Italian designer better known for handbags.

The chain has since grown to 22 marinas and one anchorage, from Umag to Dubrovnik — 18 of them open all year, four seasonal, about 6,000 berths in total. Croatia as a whole has 86 marinas today. ACI holds roughly a third of them.

It presents itself as the largest marina chain in the Mediterranean. That claim traces back to ACI itself and we have found no independent measurement of it, so we pass it on as its own.

The boats it was built for

The 1983 programme assumed a certain kind of boat: a sailing yacht of eight to twelve metres, chartered or owned by a northern European family. That boat is now the one leaving.

In a single year, between the end of 2024 and the end of 2025, berths for vessels of 6 to 8 metres fell by 19.4 per cent. Berths for vessels of 15 to 20 metres rose by 16.6 per cent. Total berths in the water fell. Revenue rose 7.9 per cent.

That is not a marina sector in trouble. It is a marina sector changing which customer it is for — fewer places, larger places, higher prices — and doing it deliberately.

Transit vessels tell the other half of it: down 3.8 per cent in 2024, then down 7.3 per cent in 2025. The fall is accelerating while occupancy of sea berths rises from 76.5 to 78.0 per cent. Croatia is not emptying. It is selling a smaller number of more expensive nights.

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What it costs to hold

Prices moved again for 2026.

ACI raised daily transit berths 11 per cent and annual berths 4.5 per cent — after the tourism minister had publicly asked the sector for reductions, and, by his own account, without the maritime minister hearing it from anyone but the press. Private marinas went further: Hramina and Drage by about 20 per cent.

The claim that Croatia has priced itself out of the nautical market is repeated far more often than it is measured. One structured comparison exists for 2026 — a Slovenian survey putting ACI Rovinj at an average €227.50 a night against €58.50 in Kotor — and it covers Slovenia and Montenegro only. Not Italy, not Greece, not Turkey.

Against it stands a fact that is measured: sea berths are fuller than last year, and all six coastal counties earned more.

What the margins say

The pressure shows up in the accounts rather than in the traffic. Between 2022 and 2024 ACI’s revenue rose 17 per cent while its costs rose 30 per cent, and its profit fell by three quarters — from 3.4 to 0.891 million euros. In 2025 the company turned over 40.3 million euros and kept 0.4 million of it.

The concessions under most of its marinas expire in 2030, which the company gives as the reason it is not investing. The marina at Porto Baroš in Rijeka, announced in 2021 and handed its concession in 2023, has been moved to 2029.

What is not settled

Whether the concessions are extended, and on what terms, decides what the network looks like after 2030 — and the company says so openly. Whether the shift toward larger vessels has a floor, or whether the 8-to-12-metre berth keeps disappearing, is not something the annual statistics can answer yet. And the sharpest number in the whole sector belongs to nobody in the sector: between a quarter and two thirds of boats at some Croatian anchorages drop anchor straight onto posidonia meadows, a protected species, at sites where nothing in law requires otherwise.