Swimming, fashion shows, beauty contests and dances: The story of Zagreb’s Riviera

Trams heading toward Zagreb’s Sava bridge once arrived packed with people carrying towels around their necks and baskets of food. The municipal beach could accommodate as many as 10,000 visitors, turning the riverbank into a vast summer stage for the city.

That world survives in a brief scene from Krešo Golik’s celebrated film “One Song a Day Takes Mischief Away.” Set in 1935, the film follows the Šafranek family to the Sava, where the irresistible Mr. Fulir also appears. The beach is not merely a backdrop. It is part of the city’s social life, a place where Zagreb’s residents and visitors meet, watch one another, hide, and fall in love.

The municipal beach offered far more than relief from the summer heat. It was Zagreb’s beach, picnic ground and sports field, as well as a setting for showing off new clothes and swimsuits. Families spent Sundays there, friends gathered, and young people pursued first romances. For decades, the wooden complex stood as a parallel city on the water, associated with carefree laughter and a social life in which class divisions could temporarily disappear.

Zagreb residents had swum in the Sava for generations, using wild beaches, bathing barrels and improvised shallow pools. The first more organized bathing facilities date to the mid-19th century. In 1852, the Viennese swimming teacher Franz, or Franjo, Hutterer opened a small facility in the Trnje area.

As the business prospered and the horse-drawn tram began running to the Sava bridge at the end of Savska Road, Hutterer opened a much more modern bathing area on June 23, 1893. It stood on the left bank beside the old road bridge, near the site where the large municipal beach would later appear. After Hutterer died, his wife Ana and daughter Marija continued to run it. Because Marija married Francek Gospodarić, older Zagreb residents remembered the site as Gospodarić’s bathing area. Today, a century after the municipal beach’s heyday, almost nothing in the landscape shows where one of old Zagreb’s liveliest social centers once stood.