Strunjan is one of the go to places on the Adriatic sea for local people to stretch out, enjoy a bit of sunshine and go for a dip!

You can find it just 40 mins from the Lodge, in between two of our favourite seaside towns on the Slovenian Riviera, Izola and Piran. In fact you can see Piran's Venetian style pointy church and sea wall directly across the crystal clear blue aqua strait.

Its easy to find, just drive down to the Slovenian coast past Koper and Izola and then on the way to Piran, there is a roundabout where you turn right and drive a km or so to a long car park. We don't need to tell you that if you are coming here for the day in the high season then arrive as early as possible in the morning. Our strategy is to do something else in the day, (there is no shortage of "something else" to do in Slovenia) and arrive late afternoon to just roll into a parking space and spend the rest of the light hours relaxing and having a swim.

The sea here and the vista are very beautiful, but don't expect too much as far as landscaping goes on shore. That said, Strunjan does what it says on the side of the bucket, it's a really excellent place to come and swim! As far as we could see there is currently just one café, serving food as well, but no hotels or other stuff on the seafront, (yet).

There is a long stone & concrete promenade with a central café and lots of trees for shade. For swimming you can just flop into the sea wherever you want, but there is a lovely big safe swim zone with a concrete pier "harbour" to climb down or jump off into the water. We cannot say it enough that this place really is great for swimming and the water is warm well into September. It's also very salty, so you can almost float around, but there are fresh water showers on land to wash all that salt off and Slovenia has no shortage of sunshine to dry you off!

In fact salt had a key influence on the history of the Slovenian coastline. If you walk left, direction Piran away from the action you will find some old sea salt fields. Harvesting the salt into large wooden frames where the sun burnt off the water and the salt was pushed into ever increasing pyramids was a key activity here and Slovenian sea salt is still great for cooking.

There are lots of places to walk off and have an explore. We decided this time to venture in the other direction and walked a bit along the coast towards Koper. We were really surprised to see the stony beach stretches off as far as you can see around the corner and there is really plenty of space here to find a nice spot.

As a foreigner, you will immediately notice the potential here for something very special.. there is a lot of space and a huge inland sea lake, (we guess it's salty) that looks to have been just left to Mother Nature, but we kinda love it like this, a bit rough and ready compared to pristine Piran. So Strunjan is not only a Slovenian name you can actually pronounce, but a wonderful place to come and swim and don't the locals just know it!

Have a nice swim!