Hilltop Towns of Inland Istria: Motovun, Grožnjan, Hum, Buzet, Roč and Oprtalj

Motovun sits at 277 metres above the Mirna valley, looking out over the Motovun Forest — Europe's most productive white-truffle ground. The municipal population is 912; only about four hundred people live inside the walls. Two concentric rings of Venetian fortification, built between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries, encircle a single square with a Romanesque-Gothic bell tower and a handful of stone houses now converted into restaurants, truffle shops and small hotels.

You park at the foot of the hill (a paid lot in summer) and either walk up the cobbled ramp through the gates or take the seasonal shuttle. The walk takes about twenty minutes and is the best part of the visit — the town reveals itself in tiers, and the views down over the vineyards and forest open up at every switchback. At the top, the loop along the outer walls takes another twenty minutes and is the best photographic vantage in central Istria.

The reason most travellers come, however, is to eat. Konoba Mondo and Restaurant Zigante (the latter in nearby Livade) built their reputations on truffle menus, and Zigante's Truffle Days run from late September into early November and are the biggest food event in the region. Motovun was also the long-time home of the Motovun Film Festival, founded in 1999, although that festival relocated in 2023 to Gorski Kotar under the new name Cinehill. The town still hosts smaller summer concerts and a popular wine show.

Hum is signposted as the smallest town in the world. The claim is built on a long-standing local tradition rather than any official ranking, but the numbers support the spirit of it: the registered population fluctuates between roughly twenty and thirty people, and the entire walled space measures around 100 metres by 35 metres — under 3,500 square metres inside the ramparts. There is one main street, two churches, one konoba and one shop selling biska, the local mistletoe-flavoured grape brandy that has been distilled here since at least the medieval period.

What makes Hum more than a curiosity is its connection to Roč, a similarly tiny hilltop village seven kilometres to the east. Both towns were among the most important early centres of the Glagolitic script — the original Slavic alphabet, devised in the ninth century, that survived in Istrian church and civic use long after Latin had displaced it elsewhere. Roč was a centre of Glagolitic printing in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; Hum's lapidary still holds three Glagolitic stone inscriptions.

The seven kilometres of country road between them is now the Aleja Glagoljaša — the Alley of the Glagolitic — a sculpture trail laid out in 1977 with eleven stone monuments by the artists Želimir Janeš and Josip Bratulić. Each monument represents an aspect of Glagolitic culture: the script itself, the Baška Tablet, the great medieval scribes, the printers of Roč. You can drive the road in fifteen minutes; walking it takes about two hours and is one of the most distinctive cultural walks in Croatia, particularly in the soft autumn light.

Of the better-known hilltop towns, Oprtalj — also signposted as Portole, its Italian name — is the one that gets fewest visitors. It sits at 378 metres on a steep ridge between Motovun and Grožnjan, reached by a single switchback road off the main valley route. There is no through traffic, no resident festival, and outside the gastronomic fairs in spring and autumn the town can feel almost asleep.

That is precisely the appeal. The Venetian loggia, restored in the 1990s, looks straight down the Mirna valley to Motovun, ten kilometres south by line of sight; the fifteenth-century Church of Saint George holds frescoes that have not been over-restored, and the side streets contain abandoned stone houses that recall what Grožnjan looked like before its revival. Two small fairs anchor the year — a truffle fair in October and an olive oil fair in November — and either is a good excuse to time a visit.

Oprtalj also makes a useful base for tasting Istria's olive oil, which is no small matter. Flos Olei, the Italian guide that ranks the world's olive oils, has named Istria the world's top extra-virgin olive oil region every year since 2016. Producers such as Chiavalon (in nearby Vodnjan), Belić (Krasica) and Ipša (just outside Oprtalj) keep tasting rooms open by appointment from spring through to early winter.