Salt Lake Mir

Jezero Mir — Lake Mir, sometimes called Salt Lake Mir — sits on Dugi Otok, inside Telašćica Nature Park, on a narrow strip of land separating the park's main bay from the open sea. It's not a random inland pond: it's a genuine lake, formed after the last ice age when sea levels rose by roughly 120 meters and seawater pushed through cracks in the karst rock to fill a depression on the island.

It's a modest size — about 900 meters long, 300 meters at its widest, and no more than 6 meters deep — but it's saltier than the open sea because of evaporation and how enclosed it is. The water can hit 33°C in summer, dropping to around 5°C in winter, and there's an odd tidal lag where the lake's level rises and falls a little behind the sea outside, since the connection runs through slow underground seepage rather than an open channel. Despite the extremes, it's not lifeless: gobies, mullet, sea bass, crabs, sea snails, and an eel that can grow to 3 kg all live in it, along with the algae that thrive in high salinity.

Telašćica itself covers about 70 square kilometers on the southeastern tip of Dugi Otok, and the cliffs on its seaward side — the Stene — drop about 90 meters below the surface after rising some 161 meters above it, which is a dramatic thing to sail past. The park charges an entrance fee (around €8 in high season, less the rest of the year), and the nearest town is Sali, the usual jumping-off point whether you're arriving by road or by water.

Most visitors get there the second way. Dugi Otok isn't the easiest island to reach on a car-ferry timetable, and the lake itself is best reached during a gulet cruise along the Croatia coast that already has Telašćica on its route — you anchor in the bay, walk across to the lake, and swim in water that's noticeably warmer and saltier than what you just came from.