Badija

Badija is a small, uninhabited island a short boat ride from Korčula Town, and its main draw isn't ruins or beaches, it's the deer. A herd of fallow deer was introduced in 1958, brought over from the Brijuni islands, and they still roam the pine forest freely, tame enough to walk straight up to visitors looking for food.

The Deer, and the Ground They Have

The original stock was small. The Brijuni administration sent over two pairs, and the herd has sustained itself on Badija ever since. The island gives them room without much competition: at 0.97 square kilometres it is the largest islet in the Škoji archipelago off Korčula's eastern end, with a coastline of roughly 4.2 kilometres and a high point of about 75 metres. The cover is dense maquis mixed with pine, cypress and old olive plantings, and the deer move through all of it.

Feeding them is why most people come, though it is worth thinking about what you hand over. These are wild animals on a small island, and bread and packaged snacks do them no favours. Beyond the deer the coast is rocky, with a few pebble coves shaded by pine and almost no facilities. There is one restaurant on the island; otherwise bring your own water and food.

Six Centuries of Franciscan Monastery

The island's other landmark is its Franciscan monastery. Land was granted to Franciscans of the Bosnian province in 1392, with the Korčula town council confirming and extending their privileges in 1394, and the complex went up across the 14th and 15th centuries. Its finest element is the cloister, completed in 1477, a square Gothic-Renaissance courtyard ringed by a cross-vaulted walkway, with five arcades along the longer sides and four along the shorter ones. The church of Our Lady of Mercy beside it is a plain single-nave Franciscan design closing in an apse, its facade carrying a carved portal and rose window. The Chapel of the Holy Cross was finished in 1663.

The monastery was never purely a religious house. In the early 15th century the island doubled as a burial ground, and among those interred was Hranić Dragošević, one of the builders associated with Korčula's cathedral. Badija was attacked by Ottoman forces in 1571 and by pirates in 1660, and during the foreign occupations of the 19th century it served intermittently as a hospital and a quarantine station before returning to the Franciscans after 1815.

Its most visible modern chapter began in 1909, when a classical grammar school opened in the monastery. It taught boys from across the region, including those who could not otherwise have afforded schooling, and its alumni went into the navy, medicine and academia. An orphanage with its own school followed in 1922, and electricity arrived in 1927. All of it ended after the Second World War. The Franciscans were expelled, the monastery closed and the property was expropriated by the communist authorities in 1949; the school shut in 1952, and the buildings passed through use as military quarters and then a prison before being converted into a sports centre and holiday complex from 1956, with the church itself used for a time as a food store. The complex was returned to the Franciscan order in 2003 and an art gallery opened there in 2019. Today only part of it is open to visitors, for a small entrance fee, and the monastery generally keeps to a season running from spring into autumn.

Getting There and Walking the Island

Access is easy. Water taxis run roughly every half hour in season from Korčula Town's east port, and the crossing takes somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes, with slower boats making it in around twenty. A rough path of about four kilometres loops the island, and most visitors manage the whole circuit, a swim, the monastery and the deer included, in something like four hours. There is a large quay for boats arriving under their own power, and one path branches uphill toward the church of St Catherine near the island's summit, built in the same period as the main church below.

What there isn't is accommodation. The island has been formally unpopulated for decades and the 2011 census recorded zero residents, so nobody stays the night; Badija is a half-day out and back, not a base.

Korčula Town, Across the Water

Half the appeal of Badija is how easily it pairs with the town it faces. Korčula Town is the largest settlement on an island of 279 square kilometres and 14,594 people, second only to Krk among the populated Adriatic islands, and its old quarter is one of the better-preserved fortified medieval towns in the Mediterranean, enough so that it sits on UNESCO's tentative list. The street plan is what everyone notices: a spine running east to west with side lanes branching off at an angle, laid out so air circulates through the town while the worst of the wind is blocked. The walls are 13th century in origin, four towers survive and all of them are 15th century, and the Cathedral of St Mark was built across the 15th and 16th. The island behind the town runs 46.8 kilometres end to end, rising to 568 metres at Klupca.

The town also trades hard on Marco Polo, though the evidence is thin. The association rests on a 16th-century tradition recorded by Giovanni Battista Ramusio, and most scholars place his capture by the Genoese off the Anatolian coast in 1296 rather than off Korčula. More reliably local are the Moreška sword dance and Grk, a white wine grown around Lumbarda and essentially nowhere else. Badija has long been a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Dubrovnik, easy to combine with an afternoon in Korčula Town itself.