There is a version of Pula that exists on itineraries: Arena, Arch of the Sergii, Temple of Augustus, ice cream, back to the bus. It is a fine version. It is also about ten percent of the city, and honestly not the ten percent where anyone from Pula spends their time.
This is the other ninety percent, or at least the parts of it you can borrow for a day.
The market first, always
The market hall, the tržnica, has been the city's stomach since 1903. The building itself is worth a look, an iron and glass construction the Austro-Hungarians put up when such architecture was the height of engineering fashion. But the point is not the building.
Downstairs and in the square around it, farmers from the Istrian interior sell what they grew or made. Depending on the season that means asparagus people picked wild that same morning, tomatoes that actually smell of tomato, figs, honey, olive oils from villages you have never heard of, and cheese from the handful of families who still bother. Upstairs is the fish market, and the rule there is simple: what you see was swimming in the Adriatic within the last day. If you have any way to cook where you are staying, buy something. If not, the stalls around the market sell burek and fritule and you will not go hungry.
Go before ten in the morning. By eleven the best produce is gone and the sellers are packing up, because their actual customers, the grandmothers of Pula, shop early and take no prisoners.
Coffee is a schedule, not a drink
Pula runs on coffee the way naval Pula ran on coal. But it is not about caffeine, it is about sitting. A coffee here is a unit of time, roughly forty-five minutes to two hours, spent at an outdoor table watching the street.
The unbroken chain of cafe tables along the giardini and the korzo is where the city actually happens. Deals, gossip, breakups, job offers, all of it over a two euro espresso the waiter will never rush you to finish. If you want to do one genuinely local thing in Pula, take a newspaper or nothing at all, order a coffee, and sit for an hour doing absolutely nothing else. It feels strange for the first fifteen minutes. Then it feels correct.
Swimming after work
Here is the thing about Pula that people from bigger cities have trouble believing: the sea is not an excursion. It is part of the daily schedule. In summer, half the city finishes work, drives or cycles ten minutes, swims, and goes home for dinner.
The local spots are not beaches in the sandy postcard sense, they are rocks and concrete platforms with ladders, pines behind you, and water so clear it looks rendered. Stoja, Valkane along the lungomare, Gortanova uvala, further out the wilder coves toward Verudela and, if you have a car and some patience for a gravel road, the whole Kamenjak peninsula south of town. Bring water shoes for the rocks and something to sit on, and you are equipped exactly like everyone born here.
The after-work swim, kupanje poslije posla, is the closest thing Pula has to a civic religion. Between June and September it explains where everyone is between five and eight in the evening.
What to skip, honestly
You do not need me to find the Arena, and you should see it. But you can skip most restaurants within a hundred metres of it, with a couple of honourable exceptions, because kitchens that never see a returning customer cook accordingly. Walk five minutes into the side streets and the food improves while the prices drop. Ask for the daily catch, drink Istrian malvazija with it, finish with a rakija someone's uncle probably made, and you have eaten the way this coast has eaten forever.
The honest summary
Pula is not a museum with a town attached. It is a working city, a bit rough at the edges, shipyard cranes on the skyline, Roman stones used as shortcuts and meeting points rather than shrines. That is exactly what makes it worth more than a two hour stop.
If you want the stones and the stories, that is literally my job, come find me. But the market, the long coffee and the evening swim, those you can do without any guide at all. Consider them homework.