Anyone who has driven the A1 motorway from Zagreb towards the Dalmatian coast will probably have seen it: a large red-and-white hotel complex sitting right beside the road, just after the Sveti Rok tunnel near the Velebit mountains. It looks ready to open. It never has.
Hotel Velebitska kraljica — 'Queen of Velebit' — was built in 2008 with three floors and 36 rooms. Not a single overnight guest has ever checked in. The restaurant and shop next door ran for a while, but the accommodation wing was never finished, and the whole saga has become one of Croatia's stranger roadside landmarks.
The story starts promisingly. In 2006, prosciutto magnate Mladen Nekić — dubbed the 'king of prosciutto' in the Croatian media — signed a deal with Croatian Motorways for the Maruni site, betting that a year-round stopover on the busiest route to the coast couldn't fail. Croatian Postal Bank financed construction with a loan of 22.4 million kuna (roughly €3 million), and by 2009 the complex was valued at around 27.84 million kuna.
Then the financial crisis hit. Nekić's company went bankrupt in 2010, a successor company followed it into insolvency, and the hotel got stuck in a legal tug-of-war. It took until June 2023 for the Municipal Court in Zadar to order Nekić to hand the building over to the state, a ruling confirmed by the County Court in Split in May 2024. The keys finally went to Croatian Motorways that November.
Since then, six tenders have come and gone. The first three drew no bids at all. A fourth attracted interest from bidders including a Chinese-backed operator, but both offers collapsed on capability requirements. In the fifth round, Nekić himself reappeared among the bidders — the job went instead to Flota Energy from Sesvete, which then withdrew without posting the required guarantee. A sixth tender produced one bidder, Degusto from Grebaštica, whose bid was accepted in February 2026. Weeks later the contract died too: Croatian Motorways wanted a €300,000 bank guarantee, Degusto argued the sum would stall renovations and offered less, and the deal auto-terminated in March.
As of August 2026, the hotel still has no investor. The building itself was never really the problem — it's finished-looking, visible and perfectly placed on a route millions of drivers use each summer. The sticking point is the gap between what the state demands and what bidders are willing or able to post.
For travellers, it's a curiosity worth knowing about rather than a place to stay: if you're driving to Zadar, Paklenica or the northern Dalmatian coast, the hotel will be there on your right after the tunnel — empty as ever. Whether it ever opens may depend on the next tender round, which would be the seventh attempt to wake the sleeping queen of Velebit.
