Luxury Camp Mon Perin Aiming for Fifth Star

Last year in Bale, a small town about twenty kilometers west of Pula, 15 apartments were sold at an average price of €4,839 per square meter, making Bale the record holder for the most expensive residential square meters in the country.

– Before, no one wanted to live in Bale, and now they pay five thousand euros per square meter to come here,’ commented an older local resident of Bale in front of television cameras. That ‘before’ referred to a period that ended two decades ago, when Bale was still a neglected town from which young people fled, and the few remaining younger people, led by Plinio Cuccurino, decided to launch a unique entrepreneurial-social project Mon Perin.

Mon Perin is a tourism company whose core business is managing the eponymous luxury four-star camp that is rapidly progressing towards another star. The company manages a total of 889 of its own accommodation units, from camping plots and luxurious spacious mobile homes to luxury villas. The daily capacity of accommodation units is around three thousand guests, and last year it recorded over 320,000 overnight stays, which was ten percent more than the previous year.

With the increase in accommodation prices, supported by investments in improving service quality, the company’s total revenue last year jumped significantly more than the growth in the number of overnight stays, namely 43 percent. With total revenue of €14.7 million, Mon Perin jumped from fifth to third position among companies where camping is the predominant activity. According to revenue, only Rovinj’s Valalta and Hadria from Novalja are now stronger than it.

In the coastal area of the Bale-Valle municipality where the Mon Perin camp operates today, there were two private camps marked with one star, colloquially referred to as ‘žlj’ category, twenty years ago. But this coastal area of Bale was the most valuable resource the municipality had and the starting point from which the revitalization of Bale began. However, first, it was necessary to change the municipal leaders.

Bale resident Plinio Cuccurino, then a member of the management of Rovinj’s Adris, along with twelve other locals, founded the Citizens’ Association ‘Mon Perin’ in 2004, which that year won the extraordinary municipal elections under the name Independent List of Plinio Cuccurino. The moves of the new municipal council in the following year, such as the allocation of 200 hectares of neglected land to locals who turned it into olive groves, motivated the residents of Bale to participate as financiers in the establishment of the trading company Mon Perin as a bearer of the development of tourism and hospitality activities at the end of 2005.

Almost all families residing in the municipality, the municipality of Bale-Valle itself, and other individuals invested in the founding capital of the newly established company. Mon Perin was thus established with a founding capital of 12.4 million kuna, which was divided into 928 business shares. In the meantime, the company has been capitalized several times, and today its founding capital amounts to 14.2 million euros, with never fewer than seven hundred shareholders.

Shortly thereafter, the municipality of Bale-Valle announced a tender for the concession for a period of 50 years for the coastal area of Bale, that is, for more than 120 hectares of land, which included the then camps Colona and San Polo, for which Mon Perin made the best offer and thus took over the management of the existing camps as early as 2006. At the same time, the company began to gradually invest in these camps to increase their categorization to two stars, which only happened six years later.