Sunj Beach

Šunj is the sandy beach on Lopud's southern shore — and that alone makes it unusual, since most of the coastline around Dubrovnik is pebble or rock. It sits in a shallow, crescent-shaped bay roughly 200 meters long, backed by pine trees, with turquoise water that stays shallow for a long stretch before it's deep enough to swim properly — good news if you're bringing kids.

Getting There from the Village

It's on the opposite side of the island from Lopud's village and harbor, reachable by a scenic 25-minute walk through the forest, or by golf-cart taxi if you'd rather skip the walk in the heat. The beach has the basics covered: sunbed and umbrella rental, showers, toilets, changing rooms, and a couple of restaurants right behind the sand. Kayaks, paddleboards, and pedal boats are usually available to rent as well.

Those golf carts exist for a reason: Lopud is car-free, so there is no road traffic anywhere on the island and the footpath over the ridge is the only land route to the bay. The island covers just 4.63 square kilometres with about 11.5 kilometres of coastline, of which barely a kilometre is sand, which is exactly why Šunj draws the numbers it does. Reaching Lopud from the mainland means the Elaphiti ferry out of Gruž harbour in Dubrovnik, which runs several times a day in season and calls at Koločep, Lopud and Šipan; the crossing covers roughly 7 nautical miles.

The Church That Gives the Bay Its Name

The name Šunj comes from the church of Our Lady of Šunj, which stands just behind the bay and dates to the 15th century. Like a good deal of the building on Lopud it was designed with one eye on defence, with a tower standing in front of the entrance, and inside it holds a wooden Renaissance-Baroque altar carved with figures and reliefs illustrating the Assumption, along with a polyptych and a wooden sculpture of St Nicholas. It is still an active place of pilgrimage, and the bay's name is simply a local contraction of the Virgin's title.

An Island That Once Punched Above Its Weight

Lopud is one of the Elaphiti Islands and today has a permanent population of just 278, as recorded in the 2021 census. That has not always been the case. The Greeks knew it as Delaphodia and later Latin and Italian sources called it Insula Media, or Mezzo, the island in the middle. By the 15th and 16th centuries it was in its golden age, with something close to 2,000 residents. Lopud shipowners ran a merchant fleet of around eighty vessels, and island captains are reckoned to have controlled roughly a quarter of the Dubrovnik Republic's tonnage at a time when Ragusa stood among the leading maritime powers of Europe. The best known of them, Miho Pracat, was born on Lopud around 1522 and became one of the wealthiest shipowners the Republic ever produced.

Wealth on that scale left buildings behind. A Dominican monastery was founded in 1482 and a Franciscan monastery with its cloister the following year, in 1483; the Franciscan complex was reinforced with a high wall in 1516 and a defensive tower in 1592, and it controlled the entrance to the harbour and the channel beyond. More than thirty churches and chapels have been counted on an island this size. On the ridge above sit the ruins of the Sutvrač fortress, a 16th-century lookout raised against Ottoman pressure and Adriatic corsairs, and still the best viewpoint over the whole archipelago. Napoleon's occupation in 1808 closed the monasteries, and in July 1813 a British naval force took the French garrison off the island.

Beyond the Beach

Back in the village, the Đorđić-Mayneri park is a 19th-century private garden turned public, planted with bamboo, cacti and species collected from around the world and watched over by small stone lions. Nearby stands the Grand Hotel, designed by the modernist architect Nikola Dobrović and opened in 1936, a landmark of interwar Adriatic architecture that effectively launched tourism on Lopud and has spent long stretches since standing empty. In recent years the island has also built up a small summer cultural calendar, with a film festival running since 2021 and jazz and literary festivals added after it.

When to Go

Because the bay opens to the south-east it catches the morning sun and is sheltered from the north-westerly maestral that gets up on summer afternoons, which is part of why the water here stays so flat. Day boats out of Dubrovnik tend to arrive late morning and clear out by mid-afternoon, so the beach is at its quietest early and again towards evening.

Šunj gets busy in high season — it's one of the most photographed beaches in the area — but it's calmer in May, June, and September, when the water's already warm enough to swim without the July-August crowds. For anyone arriving by sea, it's best reached during a Dubrovnik gulet cruise, anchoring just off the bay rather than dealing with the walk from the village.