5 Best Sights in Čakovec and the Međimurje, Zagreb and Environs

Near the spa town of Sveti Martin in the Varaždin region, Jakopić Winery is operated by brothers Martin and Branimir Jakopić, who offer superb dining as well as several kinds of tastings of wines from the lush vineyards near the border with Slovenia. The first wine here was produced in 1908, and the winery is especially renowned for its Pušipel, a notable white wine variety indigenous to Međimurje.

In a bucolic hilly setting near the Slovenian border, 15 km (9 miles) northwest of Čakovec, the village of Štrigova is best known as the largest producer of Međimurje wines. More than 20 wineries on a wine route through Štrigova and its surroundings offer tastings. It's also attractive for hiking and cycling routes (a lovely bike trail stretches from Međimurje to Hungary), the Mađerkin Breg viewpoint, the Church of St. Jerome, and three historic castles. A car or a bike is the preferred method of transport here, so that you can cruise the wine route and hit the highlights.

The first thing you're likely to notice about the Church of St. Jerome (Crkva Svetog Jeronima), which is perched on a hillside above the village center, is its yellow-and-white double steeple. Completed in 1749, the church is dedicated to the village's most famous son: St. Jerome (340–420), known for translating the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into Latin. Note the painting of a bearded St. Jerome on the facade, framed by two little windows made to look like red hearts. The church is also noted for its wall and ceiling frescoes by Baroque artist Ivan Ranger the Baptist (1700–1753). The building is usually closed, but you can call the local tourist board to arrange a look inside.

Čakovec's main square, Trg Republike, is a pretty Baroque affair, with a major highlight being the Trgovački Kasino. It's odd that the key gathering place of the town's early-20th-century bourgeois class should have survived the Communist era intact, but here it has stood since 1903, wearing its Hungarian art nouveau style very much on its sleeve: red brick interspersed with a white stucco background, squares and circles across the bottom, and curved lines formed by the brickwork working their way to the top. Back in its heyday, this was more than a casino in the gambling sense of the word: besides a card room and a game parlor, it housed a ladies' salon, a reading room, and a dance hall. The building was mostly a trade-union headquarters in the post–World War II era, and its interior is still off-limits to the public. To explore a bit further, just off Trg Republike is Trg Kralja Tomislava, the town's major pedestrian shopping street.

Set in the middle of a large shaded park right beside the main square is Čakovec's key landmark, the massive four-story Stari Grad Zrinskih. Built in an Italian-Renaissance style over the course of a century, beginning around 1550 by Nikola Šubic Zrinski, it was the Zrinski family nest until the late 17th century. The fortress's foremost present-day attraction, the Muzej Međimurja (Museum of Međimurje), can be reached through the courtyard. If you overlook the inconsistent availability of English-language text, you will be treated on this floor to an intriguing life-size look at a year in the life of a peasant family, from season to season, as you proceed through the rooms. Move up a floor for a chronological display of the region's history from the Stone Age to the recent past. Also on this floor are individual rooms dedicated to the Zrinski family, period furniture, displays of printing machinery, an old pharmacy, a fascinating collection of 19th- and 20th-century bric-a-brac, and, last but not least, a three-room gallery of impressive modern art by various painters.

Čakovec's key ecclesiastical landmark was built between 1707 and 1728 on the site of a wooden monastery that burned down in 1699. The bell tower was added in the 1750s. Inside is a late-Baroque altar decorated with elaborate statues; on the outside is a facade from the turn of the 20th century, when Hungary ruled the region, with reliefs of several great Hungarian kings from ages past.