Hvar Fortress

The Hvar Fortress, known locally as Fortica and just as often as Španjola, stands on the hill roughly 100 metres above Hvar Town. What you climb to today is essentially a 16th-century Venetian fort, but the site is a great deal older than that, and the walls carry the fingerprints of nearly everyone who has held the island.

Illyrian Hillfort, Byzantine Watchpost, Venetian Fort

Traces of settlement on the hill's northern slopes reach back to the Eneolithic, and archaeologists have identified a bronze- and iron-age hillfort dating to roughly 1000–500 BC, built by the Illyrians who occupied the island long before Venice arrived. A Byzantine fort was probably raised here in the 6th century under Justinian, and traces of it can still be picked out in the south-facing walls.

The modern story starts in 1278, when Hvar placed itself under Venetian protection to get relief from the pirates then working the Adriatic. Fortification of the hill above the harbour followed, with construction beginning in 1282 and funded in part out of the town's salt revenues. At some point in the 14th century Spanish engineers took part in the works, which is why the fort has been called Španjola, "the Spanish one", ever since. The Renaissance fortress that survives was substantially finished by 1551, a date carved above the main southern gate.

The Turks, the Lightning and the Rebuild

The walls earned their cost twenty years later. On 19 August 1571 Ottoman forces attacked Hvar; the townspeople took shelter inside the fortress and watched the town below burn.

The greater damage, though, came from the sky. At about half past three in the morning on 1 October 1579, lightning struck the gunpowder store. The resulting explosion wrecked a large part of the fortress and damaged buildings in the town beneath it. Serious repair did not follow immediately: the fortress was properly rebuilt only in the early 17th century, under the Venetian prince Pietro Semitecolo, who added Baroque defensive bastions. The last major additions — barracks and storehouses inside the walls, along with raised battlements — came during the Austrian period in the 19th century, and they are what give Fortica its present outline.

What You Find Inside the Walls

The completed fort had four circular bastions, a tower, crenellated curtain walls, an armoury, a gunpowder magazine, a large and a small water cistern, quarters for the garrison, a prison and a chapel dedicated to St John the Baptist. Most of that layout is still legible as you walk it. Cannon stand on the terraces, the dungeon can be entered and is every bit as gloomy as advertised, and a small museum holds a collection of amphorae recovered from wrecks in the surrounding sea alongside other finds from antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The view is what most visitors actually come for. From the ramparts the whole of Hvar Town lies below, the Pakleni Islands are scattered across the water directly in front of the harbour, and on a clear day the outlines of Brač and Šolta rise on the horizon. It is one of the best vantage points on the Dalmatian islands, and it costs very little to reach.

Climbing Up

The walk from the main square takes about twenty minutes on foot, up stepped lanes and through the terraced gardens behind the town, and there is a modest entrance fee at the gate. Late afternoon is the usual choice, partly for the light and partly to avoid the worst of the heat on the way up.

Higher on the same slope sits a second, later fortification: Fort Napoleon, built by the French at around 238 metres during their brief control of the Adriatic in the early 19th century, and since 1972 home to the Hvar Observatory. Between the two, the hill above Hvar Town packs most of the island's defensive history into a single climb — an easy half-day ashore if you are chartering a gulet in Croatia and want something more than another beach stop.