Alison Stewart
We flock to Greece’s famed Ionian, Saronic and Cycladic islands, but reclining like a goddess off the pointy end of Croatia is Brac, isle of stone and sea, whose bountiful attributes are sometimes overlooked in the rush to Mykonos and Santorini.
Brac is the Adriatic’s tallest isle, with its limestone massif, Vidova Gora, soaring 778 metres, affording views not just to other Croatian archipelago islands like Hvar, Korcula, Vis, Bisevo and Jabuka, but also to Italy on a clear day.
From this majestic viewpoint, you can gaze down on Croatia’s (some prone to hyperbole might say the world’s) most gorgeous – but also sneakiest – beach, the Golden Horn or Zlatni Rat.
Gorgeous because its aesthetically pleasing promontory pierces the vivid Adriatic for 430m like a golden scimitar. Sneaky because if you fall asleep there, you may end up under water.
This white-pebble spit of land that extends southwards into the Hvar channel curls slightly eastward. But when the southeasterly Jugo wind howls up from the Sahara, the beach shifts west, changing its shape.
When this golden cape is not plotting to inundate snoozing sunbathers, the regular summer northwesterly mistral wind renders it a popular windsurfing spot. Zlatni Rat is protected in Croatia as a unique geomorphological phenomenon. It pops up regularly on Croatian tourism brochures.
We’ve come to Brac, a place of exquisite white marble, lamb dishes to delight (and occasionally appal – see breakout), sublime olive oil and a ‘‘malo pomalo’’ (take it easy) Dalmatian philosophy as part of our Ponant Le Lyrial small-ship cruise from Venice to Athens.
Brac (pronounced Bra-ch), 12 kilometres wide and 40km long, is the third largest of the more than 1000 islands in Croatia’s archipelago. It’s just 11km to mainland Split and ferries and catamarans run up to 16 times daily in the summer.
Its 15,000-strong population trebles for the short summer season before the islanders sink back into their ‘‘malo pomalo’’ traditional ways of farming, stonemasonry and fishing.
We step ashore in the pretty town of Bol on the warmer, southern side of Brac (and incidentally one of the Adriatic’s sunniest locations). Our guide Leo is an aficionado not just of Croatian, Dalmatian and Brac history and politics, but also of art, wine and culture – and there’s a lot of all that.
Brac has been inhabited since Neolithic times but records begin with the Illyrians. The name comes from the Illyrian word Brentos, meaning deer. The Greeks arrived and called the
loves its quaint charms.