Istarske Vode

Musings from a region where the rain won't fall

If you were a bird flying over Istria, or maybe one of the paragliders from the launching point up on Učka, you would see a landscape dotted with bright blue spots of water.

Stay with me here a moment and imagine yourself in the mind of this flying bird. You might think for a moment that these bodies of water were lakes or ponds. If you were an older bird, a birdie elder who's been flying over these hills for years, you might notice that there’s a lot more of these bodies of water than there were ten years ago. If you were an observant bird, you might notice that the water in these blue dots was a lot bluer, a lot brighter than most natural waters. That’s because this water is not natural at all.

The Istrian landscape is no longer dominated by rolling hills, picturesque villages, or quaint kažuns (stone houses built by shepherds). It’s dominated by pools.

Most of these pools don’t get sullied by the filthy toes of local farmers. Instead, they usually belong to vacation homes that locals rent out to tourists in the summer. It’s unclear how many pools there are in Istra. However, we know that there are 421,000 tourism beds, and most of those are private apartments instead of hotels or camping grounds. For reference, the permanent population of Istria is about 200,000, meaning that there are twice as many places yawning open waiting for tourists than there are Istrians going to sleep in their pool-less houses.

The same bird flying over Istria noticing how many pools cropped up all of a sudden might wonder why we need this many when Istria is, famously, a peninsula surrounded by the sea on three sides. The bird would not be alone in wondering, I wonder as well. Many of the same tourists that spend their afternoons dipping their bodies in the pools come here for those same beaches, the water is right there, minus the potent chlorine smell. But what the tourist wants the tourist gets. 

The pools of Istria are absurd for another reason: as a region, Istria is prone to drought. We are in the midst of a tough one right now and the county authorities put forward limits on how much water people use. It is not the first one. There was a catastrophic one in 2012 that came at the tail end of three years of inadequate rainfall when the local authorities even limited water use for agriculture, a tough call in a region where many people still live off the land. But even during summers when we don’t have such pronounced drought or restrictions on water use, we’re still always thinking about water. I remember summers of forest fires. Summers of my family setting a limit on how many times a week I could wash my hair as the person with the longest hair in the family because we weren’t connected to the municipal water system yet. Springs and summers of my grandmother staring at the sky each day, begging for rain. All those memories blurred together because it happened every summer with more and more intensity, the soil around me drying up and the landscape visibly changing just during my 24 years on this planet.

For those who are not familiar with this absurd state where speaking against the golden goose of tourism is more sacrilegious than blaspheming against God (and we take the business of God very seriously as well), of course the restrictions on water that Istrians are enduring right now do not apply to waterparks, a move criticized by Možemo, the local green party. The waterparks claim that they have their own sources of water, as if it is not a travesty that they have access to those in the first place, as if the vast network of groundwater that keeps us alive isn’t interconnected. I haven’t checked, but I assume that the restrictions don’t apply to pools either. I know from family members that work cleaning other people’s AirBnBs that they change the water in between each guest, hundreds of liters delivered via truck then dumped away the next weekend. Hundreds of liters of water that has to come from somewhere, squeezing out the last gasps of a drying-out spring or reservoir not to water the plants or feed the living beings around us but so some rich person on vacation can splash around without dealing with salt.

I always thought watching my country hurtling towards destruction would be a bit more dramatic. Maybe there would be a car driving off a cliff or something like that. But sometimes, marching towards your own destruction is collected in a few images. Bustling water parks while the lakes bleed dry. 19 bright green golf courses for a region where almost nobody plays. Vacation listings advertising pools in a region dealing with drought for a decade, including pools with a sea view (!!!). Graphs on the news tracking daily tourism numbers with bated breath, often the headlining story for the day, beaming journalists telling us that we should worship at the feet of another record-breaking tourism season, and almost nobody bothering to think if those rising numbers are actually a good thing or if we should all take a break and think about it all.

Over Easter, I went back to Istria to see my family and got a touch of the pre-season madness. Two people I knew back in New York City from the diaspora independently of each other moved back to Croatia and began operating vacation homes for tourists. They rent out massive McMansions that used to tower over neighboring houses in the village but no longer do because everyone else built vacation homes. Both godparents rent out these huge homes while living in tiny apartments.

One of them, my godmother, remarried after moving back, to an honestly lovely man who was telling me about his passion for exploring and preserving Istrian history and culture. He showed me their vacation home complete with obligatory pool, and a children’s playset that he made himself out of the almond tree that used to be in the yard. I remember the almond tree from my childhood. It was over a century old and its branches stretched over most of the yard, one of the few trees like it that I’ve ever seen (almond trees rarely grow so old and so big). One of the only pictures I have of my paternal grandfather is of the wizened old man straddling his bicycle under that tree. “We managed to build the pool without cutting it down, but when the pool technician came by, he told us that the leaves and fruit of the tree are some of the most damaging when they fall into the pool, so we cut it down,” my godmother explained.

I made my excuses and sat in the car so they couldn’t see me vibrating with frustration. They could have had the pool and the tree, if they even needed the pool so badly. They were able to build the pool without disturbing the tree. But because the leaves might fall into the tree and because the pretty pink flowers might cause some undetermined damage to the pool somewhere down the line, the tree that saw generations of Durases had to go. Even my relatives that prided themselves on their care for our region’s culture and history fell before the logic of tourism.

Then again, maybe I’m being too harsh on my relatives. They’re both retired. I don’t know what their pensions are, but they’re not rolling in the dough by any means. The logic of tourism and its twin the logic of capitalism probably made the decision for them.

Every year half the peninsula watches the highways for tourism arrivals while the other half watches the skies anxiously for rain. It seems as if we never learn. All I know is that I’m afraid that one day, Istria will dry up. Then Hans the German and Federico the Italian will just stop coming, merrily finding a different tourist destination. 

Meanwhile, those of us who are left behind can try drinking the pool water.