🇭🇷 Croatia · Southern Dalmatia and the islands
Mljet is the island of silence and green: a long wooded spine laid out in the sea northwest of Dubrovnik, which many consider the most beautiful island in Croatia. Covered in pine woods that reach the water, with barely a handful of villages and nature that is almost untouched, it is the perfect flip side of the bustle of the coast. And at its heart it holds a lovely geographical rarity: two salt lakes, connected to each other and to the sea, ringed by forest.
The western third of the island is Mljet National Park, one of the oldest in Croatia (1960) and the country's first maritime park. Its two lakes, Veliko Jezero (the large lake) and Malo Jezero (the small lake), can be circled on foot or by bike, crossed by kayak and swum in, in warm, clear water. In the middle of the large lake, on an islet, stands the old Benedictine monastery of St Mary, reached on a small boat included with the ticket. It is one of the most serene and beautiful sights on the Adriatic.
This guide covers Mljet with a practical eye: how to get there by catamaran from Dubrovnik (to Pomena, Polace or Sobra) without picking the wrong port, how much park admission costs and what it includes, how to get around by bike and kayak, and what to see beyond the lakes, from the cave that legend ties to Odysseus to the sand beaches of the southeast. We also separate, honestly, the island's real history from its myths (Calypso, St Paul), and tell the curious — and instructive — story of the mongooses.
Mljet has a history as long as it is wrapped in legend. Illyrians lived here from the second millennium BC; Greeks and Romans knew it as Melita, and at Polace the ruins of a late Roman palace survive. Tradition says it was Calypso's island (the Ogygia of the Odyssey), where the nymph kept Odysseus, and that St Paul was shipwrecked here on his way to Rome; it is worth making clear that both are attributions, not proven facts (Malta also claims St Paul's 'Melita'). In 1151 the island was handed to Benedictine monks, who towards the end of the 12th century raised the monastery of St Mary on the islet in the large lake. Mljet was later tied to the Republic of Ragusa (Dubrovnik), which formally annexed it in 1410 and folded it into its system, including its famous health quarantines. In 1910 the mongoose was introduced to wipe out the vipers: it succeeded, but it also ate much of the rest of the fauna, a classic case of ecological disaster. In 1960 the National Park was created. After Austria, the wars of the 20th century, socialist Yugoslavia and Croatian independence in the nineties, Mljet today is a refuge of nature. 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.
Few Adriatic islands carry as much legend as Mljet. Before it was a national park, before it even had a Slavic name, it was Melita: that is how Greeks and Romans knew it, a place name that probably refers to honey or to the abundance of its woods.
The island has been inhabited since very early times. As far back as the second millennium BC the Illyrians settled here, specifically the Ardiaei tribe, skilled sailors and feared Adriatic pirates. With Rome's expansion, Mljet was absorbed into the province of Dalmatia, and one notable testimony survives from the late Roman period: the ruins of a large palace beside the present-day village of Polace (whose name means, precisely, 'palace'), with walls and towers from the 3rd to 5th centuries AD still standing among the houses, along with remains of early Christian basilicas.
But what made Mljet famous were two myths, both disputed. The first is Greco-Latin: tradition identifies the island with Ogygia, the place where, according to Homer's Odyssey, the nymph Calypso kept Odysseus in love with her for seven years. Hence a spectacular sea cave in the south of the island is called Odysseus's Cave. The second myth is Christian: Mljet has been proposed as the 'Melita' where, according to the Acts of the Apostles, St Paul was shipwrecked on his way to Rome, when a viper bit him without doing him harm. It is worth being clear: both attributions are traditions, not proven facts. Malta (which shares that ancient name) is the leading claimant to St Paul's Melita, and several Mediterranean islands claim the Ogygia of the Odyssey. They are beautiful legends that have accompanied Mljet for centuries, but they are not documented history.
The episode that gave Mljet its best-loved symbol came in the Middle Ages, at the hands of monks. In 1151 the island was handed to the Benedictine order, which came from the Italian region of Apulia. The monks chose a setting of almost unreal serenity: an islet in the middle of Veliko Jezero, the large salt lake in the west of the island, surrounded by water and pine woods.
There, towards the end of the 12th century, the church and monastery of St Mary were raised. The chronicles link its foundation and endowment to Desa, a prince of the Vojislavljević house, who around 1187-1198 is said to have built and donated the complex to the Benedictines. The monastery, with its Romanesque church later remodelled in Gothic and Renaissance styles and its quiet cloister, became the island's spiritual, cultural and also economic centre: the monks administered a good part of Mljet, its forests and its land.
For centuries the Benedictine community was the island's true master, and its presence left a deep mark. In time, after the reforms and the disentailment of church property, the monastery lost its religious function and passed through various uses, including as a hotel in the 20th century. Today, restored and open to visitors, and reachable on the small boat that crosses the lake, it remains Mljet's iconic image: the pale stone of the monastery reflected in the salt water, framed by the green of the forest.
Mljet's medieval and early modern history is inseparably tied to the Republic of Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik, the small, shrewd city-state that dominated much of southern Dalmatia. Ragusa gradually extended its control over the island, first in practice and then in law: in 1410 it formally annexed Mljet, which became part of the Republic's territory.
Under Ragusa, Mljet was an agricultural and forestry fiefdom, with a population of farmers, shepherds, fishermen and sailors spread across small inland and coastal villages. Feudal dues and taxes weighed on the islanders, who protested on more than one occasion. The island supplied Ragusa with timber, salt, wine, oil and seafarers, and its position made it a staging point on the routes of the southern Adriatic.
Ragusa was famous for its advanced public health system: it was one of the first republics to establish quarantines to check epidemics, obliging ships and travellers suspected of carrying plague to isolate for weeks before entering the city. Islands and outposts of Ragusan territory, Mljet among them, formed part of that sanitary and maritime control perimeter. It was also the period in which the island's rural character took the shape still visible today: stone hamlets, olive groves, vines, dry-stone walls and an unhurried pace of life set by the sea and the forest.
The 20th century left Mljet with two very different landmarks: a lesson in ecology and the creation of one of Croatia's first national parks.
The ecology lesson is named after an animal: the mongoose. The island was heavily infested with vipers, especially the venomous horned viper (Vipera ammodytes), which was a real danger to farmers and livestock. In 1910, looking for a solution, Indian mongooses, which prey on snakes, were introduced. The plan worked… too well: the mongooses finished off the vipers, but, with no natural predators on the island, they bred out of control and turned on the rest of the fauna, devouring birds, eggs, reptiles and small animals, and seriously disturbing Mljet's natural balance. To this day the island lives with their descendants. It is a classic example, cited in textbooks, of how introducing a foreign species to solve a problem can trigger a bigger disaster.
The second landmark pointed the other way: nature protection. The exceptional value of the west of the island — the two salt lakes, the Aleppo pine forests, the monastery's heritage — led to the declaration, on 11 November 1960, of Mljet National Park, which protects the western third of the island. It was the first maritime national park in what was then Yugoslavia and one of the oldest in Croatia, a pioneer in recognising that coastal and underwater landscape deserved the same protection as mountains or inland lakes. Since then the park has been the heart of Mljet's identity and the engine of its nature tourism.
When the Republic of Ragusa fell in 1808, swept away by the Napoleonic wars, Mljet followed the fate of the rest of Dalmatia. After brief French rule and the Illyrian Provinces, the Congress of Vienna of 1815 handed it to the Austrian and then Austro-Hungarian empire, to which it belonged until 1918. As on so many Adriatic islands, the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th brought poverty and emigration: many people from Mljet left the island for the Americas and Australia in search of a better life, and the population dropped to a few thousand spread across small villages.
After the First World War, Mljet became part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, later Yugoslavia. During the Second World War, southern Dalmatia was occupied by the Axis powers and was a theatre of the Partisan struggle. Once the war was over, the island formed part of Tito's socialist Yugoslavia, within which the National Park was created in 1960 and a still-modest nature tourism slowly took off.
With the break-up of Yugoslavia, Croatia declared independence in 1991 and fought the war of independence until 1995. Southern Dalmatia suffered badly in the conflict: neighbouring Dubrovnik was besieged and shelled, and the whole region lived through years of tension and paralysed tourism. Mljet, further out of the way, did not suffer the city's destruction, but it did take the economic blow of those years. With peace restored, and with Croatia's entry into the European Union (2013) and the eurozone (2023), the island has strengthened its role as a green refuge: a destination of nature, silence and clear water, proud of its national park, of its monastery on the lake and of a history in which legend and fact intertwine as in few places on the Adriatic.