Strunjan, the wild stretch of coast between Izola and Piran

The cliff and Moon Bay

The cliff is the defining feature. It rises to 80 m, is made of flysch laid down about 40 million years ago on the sea floor and is left to natural erosion, so its shape keeps changing. Together with its wooded edge and a 200 m strip of sea it is a nature reserve, and at its foot lies Moon Bay.

Stjuža lagoon and the salt pans

The Stjuža lagoon is the country’s only sea lagoon. It formed when the bay was closed off by a dam over 400 years ago, has an average depth of half a metre and until the 1950s served as a fish trap, catching a tonne of mullet, sea bass, gilt-head bream and eel each year. Today it is a Natura 2000 reserve for waterbirds.

The Strunjan salt pans are, according to the park, the northernmost and smallest in the Mediterranean. Historically part of the Piran salt pans, they still make salt like those at Sečovlje, using the traditional method of over 700 years on the petola, the microbial layer that keeps the salt clean and white.

Getting there and visiting

The park centre, in the Saltpan House, has the «Park of the Sea» exhibition and a film about the area, and there is an educational trail and guided tours by booking. You can cycle throughout the park except in the reserves, the cliff and the salt pans with the lagoon, and the Parenzana route passes alongside through the Valeta tunnel. The Nexto app has a 1.5 or 5 km route with eleven stops.

To get there, town bus line 2 links Piran, Portorož and Strunjan for €1. If you are staying on the coast, everything is set out in the coast and Karst.

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The landscape park, since 1990

Strunjan Landscape Park was created on 2 February 1990, on the initiative of the municipalities of Izola and Piran. It is the only state-level protected area in Slovenia that includes the sea, and it protects the longest natural shoreline in the Gulf of Trieste, the 130 km between Grado in Italy and Savudrija in Croatia. The landscape is completed by scattered houses, terraces with dry-stone walls and crops of olives, vines, persimmons and artichokes.

The village name, according to the park, comes from the Latin Stronnianum, the estate of a man called Stronnio, and was first written as Strugnano in 1284. In Roman times there was already a country villa and a pier here, now under water because of rising sea levels.

To sleep close to everything, search places to stay in Strunjan on Booking.com and filter by area before price.