Last updated: October 2026
The Elafiti are thirteen islands in the Adriatic in front of Dubrovnik, and only three are inhabited: Koločep, the closest to Dubrovnik, then Lopud, and last Šipan, the largest. Even so, Šipan is tiny: ten minutes by car from one side to the other, with two villages, Šipanska Luka, where we lived, and Suđurađ, on the other side.
To get to Dubrovnik there are two options. Jadrolinija, the state ferry company, arrives at Suđurađ and had the earliest boats. The TP Line catamaran arrives at Šipanska Luka, our side, on its line that continues to Mljet, Korčula and Lastovo. And sometimes we went on the company's own catamarans, when one left or arrived with passengers. Once a week we went to Dubrovnik to shop, for us (food was included) and for the guests' breakfast.
The company's catamarans came down from the north of Croatia, stopped in Mljet —a large island with a national park, famous for its two saltwater lakes and a Benedictine monastery on an islet— where the guests toured by bike, and then came to Šipan and slept in the company's rooms. We did the check-ins, cleaned rooms, replaced towels, served the breakfast buffet and made coffees to order. There were kayak tours and electric-bike tours of the island; the guides ran them, and we maintained the bikes and carried and cleaned the kayaks. We were six and split into pairs, and because I came from managing a hotel I made the schedules and days off, in touch with the owner's daughter, who ran the head office in Zagreb.
In Croatia many people work the whole summer with no days off, and there was a reason for it. Until 2024 there was a public scheme called “stalni sezonac”, «permanent seasonal worker»: during the months without work, the employer kept paying your pension contributions (with the state refunding most of it) and the employment service, the HZZ, paid you an allowance of 60% of the base for the first 90 days and 30% after that. So the season was worked flat out. The scheme was scrapped in 2025. The owner wanted that logic with us, but we were foreign workers on a programme: no one was going to pay us in winter in Argentina.
After seven or ten days of doing things his way, we started setting working hours and days off, in agreement with his daughter. He did not like it. On top of that, the accommodation was not what was agreed: for weeks we slept piled into guest rooms, a flat with one bedroom for all of us, and when the rooms were full, on the catamaran again, with a 23-kilo case that did not fit in the cabin. It ended in a shouting argument in front of the guests.
The owner of WE USA tried talking to her friend and to him. Nothing changed. So she asked us to find other jobs and resign, and she did something agencies do not do: she refunded the programme. We had paid about a thousand dollars six or seven months earlier, and she paid us back in pesos what a thousand dollars was worth on that day, so we would not lose to inflation. Paying a programme buys the paperwork and the placement, not a guarantee that you will have a great time; she did not have to. But it was the first time, and it was her name.
I did what I had done for Brazil and for my internships: I created an email and sent our CVs to at least forty hotels in Dubrovnik. Someone was going to answer.
Keep reading: from Dubrovnik to Zagreb via Plitvice →
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