Vela Prizba

Vela Prizba is a bay on the south coast of Korčula, part of the small settlement of Prižba in the municipality of Blato. It is a swimming and lunch stop rather than a sight — no old town, no ramparts, no museum — and that is exactly what makes it useful on a charter week otherwise heavy on medieval stonework. The bay faces the open sea, with the low profile of Lastovo and its archipelago on the horizon.

The Bays, the Beaches and the Islets

Prižba is really a string of small bays rather than one. The two largest, Vela and Mala Prizba, sit either side of a low peninsula that carries a pebble beach of its own, and the settlement as a whole is bracketed by two headlands, Ratak and Priščapac. The best-known beach in the area, Veli Zal, lies inside the sheltered Vela Prizba bay on the eastern side of Ratak: roughly 100 metres of pebble with a shallow, gradual entry that suits families, a snack bar and restaurant behind it, a shop nearby, and jet-skis, boats and a windsurfing school working off it in season. Shade is thin, apart from a stone wall that throws some shadow in the afternoon. Mali Zal, a smaller pebble beach, lies a little further east, and Priščapac has beaches on both flanks along with a sports-diving centre.

Between the shore and the open sea there is a scatter of islets — Stupa, Crkljica, Sridnjak, Vrhovnjak, Otočac and Cerin among them — which is what gives this stretch its shelter and, incidentally, its interest for anyone with a tender and a spare afternoon. Like almost all of Korčula, the shoreline here is pebble, rock and concrete slabs rather than sand, so sea shoes earn their place in the bag.

The south coast of Korčula in general is the steeper and more indented side of the island, cut with coves and small beaches looking out towards the Lastovo archipelago, while the northern shore is flatter and more open. That geography is why charter routes along the south run bay to bay — Prižba, Brna, Istruga, Pupnatska Luka — rather than port to port. Beyond the ACI marina at Korčula Town itself, the island has nine smaller harbours and something like a dozen usable anchorages, most of them concentrated on these southern and eastern shores.

From Fishing Village to Holiday Coast

Prižba was, until fairly recently, an almost purely fishing settlement, and before that not really a settlement at all: an empty bay used by the people of Blato, ten kilometres inland, who eventually built summer houses along it. Tourism has since replaced fishing as the main source of income, and most of what you see from the water today is holiday accommodation of one kind or another, low-built and largely hidden in the pines.

The one thing here with nothing to do with either fishing or tourism is a small Sisters of Mercy convent in the middle of the village. On 25 August 1920, in Prižba, Marija Petković wrote the first Constitutions of the Daughters of Mercy, the order she founded. It was formally inaugurated that 4 October, the feast of St Francis of Assisi, when she took the name Marija of Jesus Crucified and became its first Mother Superior. She was beatified in her own right, and a village of this size having a hand in the founding of a religious order is a genuinely specific claim to fame — one that most boats motoring past the bay have no reason to know about.

Anchoring and Access

The local anchorage, sometimes called Prižba Mali, is a small, quiet harbour tucked behind the islets of Crkljica, Sridnjak and Vrhovnjak. It is comfortable in settled weather, but the shelter is not complete: swell from the south and south-east finds a way in, and in a strong sirocco this is not where you would choose to spend the night. Brna, the nearest proper harbour, lies just over two miles east and is the usual fallback.

By land, Prižba is about forty-five minutes by car from Korčula Old Town, reached either along the coast through Smokvica and Brna or over the hill via Blato. Blato is roughly ten kilometres away, Vela Luka sixteen, Brna four and Smokvica eight, and buses between Korčula Town and Vela Luka pass through Blato, though connections down to Prižba itself are sparse. The area has cafés, restaurants and shops, which covers most of what a crew needs for a few hours ashore.

What Else Is Nearby

Korčula is the sixth largest Croatian island — 279 square kilometres, about 47 kilometres long and never more than eight wide, with 182 kilometres of coastline — and its western end repays some attention. Blato is known for Zlinje, an avenue of 117 lime trees planted in 1911 and running a kilometre from one side of the town to the other, reportedly the second longest such avenue in Europe after Berlin's Unter den Linden. Vela Luka, at the island's western tip, is the ferry port for Split and Lastovo and was founded by Blato families exporting their wine and oil. Above it, the cave of Vela Spila — a cavern some 40 metres long and 17 metres high, sitting about 130 metres above the sea — has yielded evidence of human occupation reaching back roughly twenty thousand years, which makes it one of the more significant prehistoric sites in Europe.

Blato is also the place to see the island's other sword dance. Korčula Town performs the Moreška, a staged sixteenth-century battle between two armies over a veiled woman; the inland and western villages — Blato, Smokvica, Čara, Vela Luka, Žrnovo and Pupnat — perform the Kumpanjija instead, a chain dance in which each man holds the tip of the blade in front of him, accompanied by drum and bagpipe. It descends from the militias these unwalled villages kept for their own defence. Blato dances it on 28 April, the feast of St Vincenza, whose relics were brought from Rome by way of Korčula in the eighteenth century and who has been the town's patron ever since. Korčula Town, meanwhile, maintains the long-contested claim to be the birthplace of Marco Polo — a claim resting on local tradition and Venetian-era paperwork rather than on anything as convenient as a birth record.

Wine is the island's other calling card. The inland villages of Čara and Smokvica produce Pošip, the white variety first identified on Korčula, while Lumbarda at the eastern end grows Grk, a grape found nowhere else in the world. Between the vineyards, the cave and the walled town at the far end of the island there is more than enough to build a week around — and as a swim break on the way to or from Korčula Town, Vela Prizba is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet from Dubrovnik.