Tar-Vabriga is a municipality formed in 2006 seceding from the city Porec. It counts arround 2000 inhabitants. Once these were two settlements, but today they are one place separated only with main road which is connecting Porec and Novigrad.
Teritory of Tar and Vabriga is interwoven with the history, from the sixty million years old dinosaur foot prints and the bones and tusks of mammoths, to the ruins of prehistoric people. And even today, archeological excavations are held in the area of Cervar and Larun where have been found the remains of Roman villa rustica, oil refineries, country villas of Patricians and royal families, former amphorae factory and even flooded ports and piers. According to the inscription on the stone gable of the church of St. Martin, Tar bay was in 1800. visited by Pope Pius VII.
Tar-Vabriga is olive growing region and it is considered to have one of the best olive oils in the Mediterranean. Even before nearly two thousand years ago, the famous Roman writer, Marcus Valerius Martial, wrote: UNCTO CORDUBA LAETIOR VENAFRO HISTRA NEC MINUS ABSOLUTE TESTA (You Cordoba, which is more fertile than oily Venafra and perfect as the oil from Istria).
Fishing in Tar bay has been done in the same manner for already whole millennium, as evidenced by numerous documents. The bay is closes with a fishing net so the fish is surrounded and then the same fishing net, almost 2 kilometers long, is pulled toward the end. At the end the net is closed by its ends and the fish is pulled to the boat.
The economy of Tar-Vabriga is related mainly to tourism, with renting private accommodation and tourist resort Lanterna. According to official data from the Croatian Tourist Board for the year 2015, municipality Tar - Vabriga is placed on the 10th place in Croatia with its realized amount of overnight stays. The result is remarkable considering the size of the municipality. Just to compare; municipality Tar-Vabriga generates about 1.5 million overnight stays while the city of Zagreb generates about 1.7 million overnight stays. Tar-Vabriga has 2,000 inhabitants and the city of Zagreb about 800,000. The results can be measured also with seaside cities such as Pula, Split and Losinj that achieve a similar number of overnight stays as Tar-Vabriga. Except of the famous tourist resort Lanterna with camps, hotels and apartments, an increasingly important role in the amount of overnight stays has private accommodation in which we include apartments, houses and villas with swimming pool. Population is increasingly investing in various forms of private accommodation as in the long run it provides nice additional income.
Fishery and hospitality in tourism are at the second place in the total representation, and residents are in the past few years more and more involved in agriculture and olive oil. Most of the residents travel to Porec on their work place.
Near Tar is located cheese dairy in the complex of Stancija Spin - the area where material traces of the centuries-old tradition of sheep raising are known. Today's modern chees dairy is located next to the traditional Istrian farming house, today a tavern, which perfectly reflects the approach to the production of cheese: modern technology only complements the wisdom of centuries-old chees dairy traditions and wealth of Istrian pasture. With the investment in 2013. chees dairy capacitiy has been increased to 300 t of hard cheese and 100 t of curd cheese annually. The products are sheep's, cow's, mixed cheese and cheese in Teran and with truffles. Sheep's and cow's curd is also produced.
In the area of Larun is planned to be build a golf course with 18 holes, with an area of about 125 ha and 1,200 beds in hotels, tourist apartments and villas of the highest category. The construction of this complex, which will ultimately be in close contact with existing and planned tourist attractions in the area of Santa Marina and Lanterna resort, will have a very significant impact on the economic development of the wider area.