🇭🇷 Croatia · Southern Dalmatia and the islands
Hvar is the island of sun, lavender and white marble: a long, luminous strip in the heart of the Adriatic that earned a reputation as a glamorous destination, with its yachts, its fashionable bars and its postcard sunsets. But reducing it to the partying would be unfair. Behind the shine is an island with more than two thousand four hundred years of history, Greek fields still under cultivation, sleepy stone villages and clear-water coves reachable only by boat.
Its capital, Hvar town, is a small Venetian port climbing the hillside: a great marble square presided over by the cathedral of St Stephen, steep lanes, a theatre from 1612 that was among the first in Europe open to ordinary people and, crowning it all, the Spanish fortress (Fortica) from which you can see the Pakleni archipelago floating opposite. On the other side of the island, Stari Grad holds a quiet treasure: its plain, parcelled out by the Greeks twenty-four centuries ago and now a World Heritage Site.
This guide covers Hvar with a practical, honest eye: how to get there without falling into the classic confusion between the catamaran to Hvar town and the car ferry to Stari Grad, what to see and what it costs, how to slip over to the Pakleni, where to see the lavender and what to eat and drink on an island that has made wine since antiquity. We also set out the local rules (yes, there are fines for walking through the centre in a swimsuit) so you can enjoy it without any nasty surprises.
Hvar has one of the oldest and richest histories on the Adriatic. Around 384 BC, Greek colonists from the island of Paros founded Pharos, at what is now Stari Grad, and divided the neighbouring plain into a grid of fields that is still farmed and that UNESCO declared a World Heritage Site in 2008. After the Illyrians and the Romans, the island passed through Byzantium, the Croatian-Hungarian kings and, above all, Venice, which ruled it for centuries and made Hvar town a strategic port on the route to the East. From that period come the arsenal and the theatre of 1612, the cathedral and the fortifications. There was also a great popular rebellion (1510-1514), harshly repressed, and centuries of plague, corsairs and Venetian decline. Then came Austria, early tourism at the end of the 19th century, the world wars, socialist Yugoslavia and, after the war of independence in the nineties, today's Croatia. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Croatia's southernmost tip and its islands: the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik) and its diplomacy, the abolition of the slave trade in 1416, the earthquake of 1667, the islands of Hvar, Korčula and Mljet, island depopulation and the siege of Dubrovnik in 1991.
Read the history of Southern Dalmatia and the islands →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before the yachts and the lavender, something exceptional happened on the fertile plain of eastern Hvar: a group of Greek colonists laid out a grid of fields so precise that, twenty-four centuries later, it is still farmed. It is probably the best-preserved ancient agricultural landscape in the whole Mediterranean.
Around 384 BC, colonists from the Aegean island of Paros founded a city at what is now Stari Grad and named it Pharos, after their homeland. Like every Greek city-state, Pharos had an urban core (the asty) and an agricultural territory (the chora). And what makes Hvar unique is that chora: the colonists divided the neighbouring plain into some 75 rectangular plots of almost identical size (each around 16 hectares), bounded by dry-stone walls and separated by grid-straight tracks. It was the equal division of land among the colonists, a geometric land register from the 4th century BC that has survived intact in its layout.
The founding was not peaceful: the Greeks had to overcome the island's Illyrian population, and an ancient source records a naval battle in which the newcomers, helped by Dionysius of Syracuse, defeated the Illyrians who were trying to drive them out. In time a man of Pharos, Demetrius (Demetrius of Pharos), came to command Illyrian troops and married a queen of that line; around the 220s BC he defied Rome, and his defeat dragged the city down with him: Pharos was taken and destroyed by the Romans in 219 BC.
Rome rebuilt and Latinised the island, which came to be called Pharia and then, in the mouths of its inhabitants, drifted towards today's Hvar. But those Greeks' greatest legacy was not the walls or the temples but the fields: the Stari Grad Plain, with its stone boundaries and its same crops of vine and olive, was inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site in 2008, living testimony to more than two thousand four hundred years of agricultural continuity.
With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Hvar remained in the orbit of Byzantium, which controlled the Dalmatian coast and its sea routes. The island, with its natural harbours and its position halfway along the Adriatic, was a valuable stop on the run between Italy and the East.
Between the 7th and 8th centuries the Slavs arrived, settling on the islands and the coast and eventually giving Dalmatia its Croatian character. Through the early Middle Ages, Hvar swung between the nominal sovereignty of Byzantium, the influence of the Croatian kings and the appetites of the Italian maritime cities. The centre of power shifted: the old Greek Pharos (Stari Grad) gradually lost prominence, and over the centuries a new port arose at the western tip of the island, today's Hvar town, better placed to watch the routes and easier to defend.
Like the whole Dalmatian coast, the island suffered the constant threat of piracy. The corsairs of Omiš and, later, raids from the sea forced the settlements to be fortified and refuges to be built up high. It was in this context of maritime insecurity that Hvar's role as a strategic base took shape, a role that would reach its fullest expression when the island entered, for good, the orbit of the Republic of Venice.
In 1331 Hvar recognised the sovereignty of the Republic of Venice, which, apart from brief interruptions, would rule the island until 1797. Those were almost five centuries that marked its appearance for good: the white marble of its palaces, its loggias, its fortifications and its culture all bear a Venetian stamp.
Venice made Hvar town a first-rank naval base. Its sheltered bay, screened by the Pakleni islands, was the ideal anchorage for the galleys running the route to the Levant; the town became a supply and repair point for the fleet. From that function came the Arsenal, the great building on the harbour where warships were careened, and above it, in 1612, the commune raised a public theatre considered one of the oldest in Europe: not a court theatre reserved for the nobility, but a space open in principle to the city's different social ranks, remarkable for its time. The cathedral of St Stephen was also built, as were the fortresses that still crown the town, among them the Fortica, reinforced in the 16th century — with input from engineers in the service of the Spanish Habsburg crown, hence its nickname 'Spanjola' — to shield the harbour from corsairs and from the Ottoman fleet.
But the splendour had a hard underside. Hvar society was split between a minority of nobles, who monopolised power and land, and a majority of commoners, sailors and farmers with no political rights. That tension exploded in the great popular rebellion of 1510 to 1514, led by Matija Ivanić, one of the first major social uprisings on the Adriatic. The rebels came to control the island, but Venice eventually put the movement down harshly: its leaders were executed and some hanged in public as a warning. To the social upheaval were added the plagues: pestilence struck Hvar in several waves, decimating its population, and naval raids left scars, such as the Ottoman sack of 1571, on the eve of the battle of Lepanto. Even so, under Venice Hvar also lived a notable cultural flowering, with Renaissance poets in Croatian and Latin, such as Hanibal Lucić and Petar Hektorović, the latter the builder in Stari Grad of his famous fortified house, the Tvrdalj.
The fall of Venice in 1797, at Napoleon's hands, opened a period of rapid change. After brief French rule (as part of the Illyrian Provinces of the Napoleonic empire), Hvar passed in 1815, under the Congress of Vienna, to the Austrian and then Austro-Hungarian empire, under whose sovereignty it would remain until 1918.
The 19th century brought, alongside administrative modernisation, a deep economic crisis. Phylloxera, the plague that devastated Europe's vineyards, ruined the wine trade, one of the pillars of the island economy, and pushed thousands of Hvar islanders to emigrate, above all to the Americas and Australia. In that context, two crops gained ground on the slopes: rosemary and, very especially, lavender, whose distillation would become in the first half of the 20th century a mainstay of the island and part of its identity.
But the Austrian century also left an unexpected and lasting legacy: tourism. In 1868 the Hygienic Society was founded in Hvar town, one of the oldest tourist associations in Europe, which promoted the island's exceptional climate — among the sunniest on the continent — as a health and rest destination for Central European travellers. The first hotels and sanatoria were built, and Hvar began to build its reputation as a mild winter retreat. That early discovery of climate as a resource was the seed of what, a century later, would make the island one of the most coveted destinations on the Adriatic.
The 20th century swept Hvar along in the same current as the rest of Croatia. After the break-up of Austria-Hungary in 1918, the island became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later called Yugoslavia. During the Second World War, Dalmatia was occupied first by fascist Italy and then by Nazi Germany; a strong Partisan resistance organised on the islands and the coast, and many Dalmatian civilians were evacuated to refugee camps in the Egyptian desert near Cairo to escape the fighting and the reprisals.
Once the war ended, Hvar became part of Tito's socialist Yugoslavia. Those were decades of continuous emigration from an island with limited resources, but also of tourism's definitive take-off: from the sixties and seventies, the guaranteed sun, the clear sea and the Venetian heritage made Hvar an ever more popular destination, with large hotels and an expanding summer season.
With the break-up of Yugoslavia, Croatia declared independence in 1991 and fought the war of independence (or Homeland War) until 1995. Hvar, far from the land front lines, did not suffer the fighting and destruction endured by cities such as Vukovar or Dubrovnik itself, but it did feel the brutal blow to tourism during the war years, with seasons that were practically empty and hit the whole island economy.
With peace restored, and with Croatia's entry into the European Union in 2013 and the eurozone in 2023, Hvar saw a spectacular tourism boom. Today it is an island with two faces at once: the international glamour — yachts, fashionable bars, high-end dining, luxury prices and crowds at the height of summer — and the old one, of the Greek fields still under cultivation, the lavender inland, the vertical vineyards of the south and the stone villages where life keeps its slow rhythm. Understanding that double nature is the best way to enjoy it.