Guests of Little Green Bay lounge on the beach in Croatia.

“Croatia is a boutique country now,” says my friend Davor Dragojlovic. This sounds like a compliment, but he means it as a joke, a dig about the republic being tiny and expensive. Maybe because I, too, am Croatian, I get the joke.

And I feel it. We are in Zagreb and I am sipping champagne amidst giant, multicoloured hydrangea in the garden of Davor’s 1920s modernist flat. We are debating Croatia’s tourism potential – newly Schengenized, a mere 30 years postwar, yet still facing hiccups from its decades-long transition from a socialist economy to a market-based one.

With a population below four million and territory on par with Nova Scotia, this country is indeed small. But small can be good. Small can mean sustainable and resp

See Full Page