The birds are chirping in the background, and your gaze wanders out of the window past deep green pine trees to come to rest on the glistening Mediterranean Sea. This is how you wake up these days at the Falkensteiner Hotel Park Punat on the island of Krk, Croatia. But the 4-star active hotel was not always a hotel. It used to be a state-of-the-art pasta factory. Find out about the history of Punat pasta and many other exciting aspects of Punat here!
Orlić – Punat Kennedys
Although geographically located in completely different parts of the world, picturesque Punat on the island of Krk and the Central American state of Costa Rica are closely connected. And Punat’s inhabitants can boast, among other things, that they have even “given” the country a president. The most deserving representative of this unusual connection is Franjo Orlić Ladić, a Punic emigrant who set out in 1873 as a 15-year-old due to the poor economic conditions on his home island and landed in faraway Costa Rica. The young Orlić found employment in a shop there, where his entrepreneurial spirit soon emerged. He bought a piece of land and started growing coffee. Accustomed to the “stingy” coastal land, he began to dig up his plot so that his yield was more successful than that of others.Coffee and pasta factory
He soon built on the success by founding his own coffee factory, which is still in operation today but no longer owned by the Orlić family. He also started entrepreneurship in his hometown of Punat, opening the first pasta factory in Punat together with Anton Žic in 1907. The factory was technically advanced and had its own electricity connection. This is special in that the town itself was not supplied with electricity until two decades later. The machines for pasta production were ordered directly from Vienna. For this purpose, Franjo Orlić Ladić also founded an Austro-Croatian steamship joint-stock company in Punat with four ships, which maintained regular lines in Kvarner.
Ladić and Žic never imagined when they founded the pasta factory that Punat would become a popular tourist destination and that the factory would become a hotel in 1963. After all, they founded the factory primarily for local fishermen.
The beginning of Jadrolinija
Some of these ships sailed until the 1960s, so this company was the beginning of today’s Jadrolinija, a Croatian shipping company. Ladić was also one of the founders of the Punat Bathing Company, which celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2008, and a benefactor who helped people and invested in various projects. The fact that he crossed the Atlantic more than 40 times speaks best of Franjo Orlić Ladić’s attachment to his homeland.Today’s souvenir
Even today, the traces of the former factory can still be seen in the Falkensteiner Hotel Park Punat. There, where guests find the breakfast and dinner buffet, there is a special “pasta corner” with photos and reports from that time. Take a look and immerse yourself in a piece of Punat’s history! By the way, where the hotel reception is today, there used to be an ecologically advanced wood gas engine that produced electrical energy for the factory – as you know, almost 20 years before the electrification of the town.
