Villa Amalia

It was built in 1890 as an annex to the six years older hotel Kvarner, immediately behind the buildings for cold water baths (Kaltbäder), where the secession-styled wooden bathing beach Jadran was located until the fire in 1989. Villa Amalia was designed for the most sophisticated guests who preferred to distance themselves from the other hotel clientele. And indeed, the guests in the villa were the Rumanian royal couple, Carol and Elizabeth (alias Carmen Sylva), the founders of the woodland promenade; in 1894, the villa was the meeting place between Franz Josef I and William II, it accommodated the German royal family, as well as Isadora Duncan, the dancer who observed the flutter of palm leaves in the wind and learned her movements from them, then there was the grand duke of Luxembourg, Alfred of Nassau, who celebrated his silver wedding anniversary here, while the inhabitants of Opatija remembered his everyday strolls to the concert pavilion with a meter-long cigarette (which he had made after his physician agreed to allow him to smoke a cigarette a day). During the interwar period, as the residence of the Italian Savoia dynasty, the villa Amalia was raised with an additional floor.