Imagine an old farmhouse…brought back to life.

The oldest finds nearby go back to Roman times: burial mounds and road fragments near a neighbouring hamlet. In 1373, a Hungarian count with land across what’s now the Slovenian border built Banfi Manor on the hill next door. A century later, in 1447, a papal bull named nearby Štrigova as the birthplace of St Jerome; modern historians doubt it, but the belief took hold, and a church was built on the strength of it.

The border kept moving long after that. Over the twentieth century the area shifted between Yugoslav and Croatian administration; Banfi itself was briefly assigned to Yugoslav Slovenia in 1945 before joining Croatia the following year. This corner of Croatia has spent centuries sitting where empires and borders met, and the place has been shaped, again and again, by whoever held that border at the time.

The Međimurje Wine Road runs directly through Banfi. Around thirty family wineries work this stretch of hills, most of them growing pušipel, the one grape genuinely native to the region. It’s not large-scale production; it’s small vineyards and family names on the bottles.

The food follows the same pattern. Gibanica, pumpkin-seed oil and home-cured meat are the local staples, and several of the area’s restaurants have real credentials to match: Terbotz, on Železna Gora, whose chef won a Gault&Millau award in 2020; Mala hiža, widely considered the county’s benchmark table; and Stridon, in the centre of Štrigova, currently run by Ivana Golenko (lovely, if we may add), whose family also makes and sells much of the produce served there.

Cycling and hiking routes wind through the hills around Banfi, connecting the wine villages at whatever pace suits you. If a slower day is more the mood, Terme Sveti Martin (billed as Croatia’s first “Adria Bike Resort”) is a short drive away, with thermal pools, an aquapark and a golf course.

Through spring and summer, the villages come alive with festivals: Urbanovo’s wine celebrations in May, Štrigovske noći’s food and music in July, and, right on Mađerkin breg itself, an international jazz festival each August, with vineyards for a stage. And when you want the long view, the same hill’s viewpoint tower puts four countries in front of you at once.