Church of St. Euphemia, Rovinj

Church of St. Euphemia, Rovinj tickets: which one to buy

The church crowns the hill at the centre of Rovinj's old town, and every lane in the peninsula leads up to it eventually. Entry to the church is free; the bell tower is ticketed, cheap, and the reason most people come. Be warned about the climb: the stair is a wooden structure inside the tower, steep, open in places and not for anyone uneasy with heights, but the view over the red roofs, the harbour and the islands is the best in Istria.

Walking tours of the old town end here and take about an hour. Boat trips to the islands and to the protected cape south of town leave from the harbour below. Rovinj is among the most visited places on the Croatian coast, so the timing of a visit matters more than the choice of tour. The church closes for services. Rovinj has no large car park inside the old town, so drivers leave vehicles on the approach road.

Visiting Church of St. Euphemia, Rovinj: what to see

The present church was built between 1725 and 1736 over earlier Christian buildings, a broad three-aisled baroque hall whose front was completed only in 1883. The relics of Euphemia, a young martyr of Chalcedon, lie in a Roman sarcophagus of the sixth century, adapted in the fifteenth; the local story says the stone coffin floated across the Adriatic and grounded below the town in the year 800, and that two oxen dragged it up the hill when no one else could move it.

Inside there are Gothic statues of the fifteenth century and paintings of the sixteenth and seventeenth. The bell tower, built between 1654 and 1680, is a deliberate copy of the campanile in Venice and stands about sixty metres high; on top, a copper statue of the saint turns with the wind, which is why fishermen have watched it for three hundred years. The sarcophagus stands in a chapel to the right of the altar and is opened for veneration on the feast day.

Church of St. Euphemia, Rovinj opening hours and the best time to go

July and August are very busy and the old town lanes are shoulder to shoulder in the evening; June and September give the same sea and half the people, and May and October are quieter still. The tower closes in high wind and in winter. Late afternoon is the time to climb, with the light behind you over the water and the islands. The feast of Saint Euphemia on the sixteenth of September brings pilgrims and a fair to the town and is worth seeing.

Sunsets from the rocks below the church are a local ritual. Rovinj has an Italian-speaking minority and bilingual signs, and the food reflects it. Twenty minutes inside the church, plus the climb, and the walk up through the lanes is part of the point rather than an obstacle. The tower stair is closed for an hour at lunchtime in the busiest months to let the queue clear.