Sipanska Luka

Šipanska Luka is the main port on the western side of Šipan, the largest of the Elaphiti Islands, and one of only two settlements on it, the other being Suđurađ on the opposite coast. It lies about 8.3 nautical miles (roughly 12.5 kilometres) from Dubrovnik's Gruž harbour, with car and passenger ferries running all year and a crossing of around an hour. Šipan itself covers some 16.2 square kilometres, measures about 9 kilometres long by 2.6 wide, and rises to 243 metres at Velji Vrh.

The Bay

The harbour is a large part of the appeal for anyone arriving by sea. The bay is deep, narrow and well sheltered, which made it a natural safe haven for centuries and still makes it one of the more comfortable anchorages in the archipelago, protected from most winds with the exception of a strong northwesterly, which can push in swell. Both of the island's bays are geographically sheltered, and both are long-standing favourites with sailors. Beyond a few short quays most boats anchor or pick up one of the buoys laid off the village.

An Island of the Dubrovnik Republic

The Croatian name Šipan is first recorded in 1371; in the thirteenth century the island appears as Juppana, later Italianised to Giuppana, the name the British navy was still using when it seized the island in 1807. Šipan came formally under the Republic of Ragusa in 1426, and its sheltered harbours and unusually fertile interior made it important enough that the republic stationed a local governor, or Rector, here. His seat was a modest Gothic Rector's Palace built above Šipanska Luka in the fifteenth century, with bifora windows on the facade; the stone shell still overlooks the bay.

Through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the island became the summer retreat of choice for Dubrovnik's patrician families, who built villas and fortified estates across it. More than forty such properties have been counted, a few restored and many now ruins, alongside some thirty-odd churches and chapels of various periods. The Sorkočević family's summer house stands at Šipanska Luka; across the island at Suđurađ the merchant Tomo Skočibuha built his residence in 1539, adding a tall defensive tower in 1577 against the pirate raids that troubled the coast. The great earthquake of 1667 and the abolition of the republic in 1808 ended that era, and the island's population, once close to 2,000, now stands at around 476. The 2011 census had recorded 416 residents, split between the two villages.

Life here was built on the sea and the land in roughly equal measure: shipbuilding and seafaring, fishing, olives and vines. Šipan lies about 17 kilometres northwest of Dubrovnik and is administered as part of the city itself and of Dubrovnik-Neretva County, a legacy of how tightly it was bound to the old republic. At Suđurađ the Skočibuha estate still shows what a fortified Renaissance villa looked like, with two guard towers and a crenellated wall running down to the harbour, and the parish church of St Stephen stands close by. The archipelago's name comes from the Greek word for deer, and the islands are usually identified with the Elaphites recorded by Pliny the Elder in the first century AD.

Churches, Olive Groves and the Valley Between

A short walk from the water is the fortified Church of the Holy Spirit, dated 1577, which holds paintings from the fifteenth century, older than the building around them. On a rise between the two settlements is the Pakljena Benedictine complex, whose Church of St Mary was founded in the fourteenth century, rebuilt in Renaissance form in the sixteenth and guarded by a stout watchtower; the monastery remained active into the nineteenth century, and the church holds a sixteenth-century painted altarpiece of the Assumption of Mary. Older fabric survives elsewhere on the island, including wall painting of St John the Baptist that predates the eleventh century, and a tiny chapel of St Peter up on Velji Vrh.

Between the two villages lies Šipansko Polje, a fertile valley roughly five kilometres long and the reason the island mattered to Dubrovnik in the first place. It is planted with olives, figs, vines and citrus, and Šipan's olive groves are what the island is best known for: it carries more than 300,000 olive trees and holds a Guinness World Record for their number relative to its size and population. Walking the valley track from one harbour to the other, past dry-stone walls, chapels and old terraces, is the classic way to spend a few hours ashore.

Visiting

Getting around is straightforward. One road links the two villages, there are very few cars, and ferries from Gruž call at Suđurađ as well as Šipanska Luka, with a fast catamaran service also stopping here, so it is easy to land at one harbour, walk across the island and leave from the other. Almonds and carobs grow alongside the olives, and what tourism there is amounts to a handful of konobas along the waterfront and a few small hotels and apartments.

The village is busiest from June through August, though May and September deliver much the same warm sea with a fraction of the crowds. With Lopud and Koločep, the only other inhabited islands in the chain, both a short hop away, Šipanska Luka is a classic stop on a Dubrovnik blue cruise itinerary, usually paired with a swim stop at one of the smaller islands on the same day.