Scedro Island

Šćedro is a small, mostly uninhabited island just south of Hvar — close enough that it's often folded into the same day's sailing. Its Latin name, Tauris, is tied to one of antiquity's more overlooked naval battles: in 47 BC, a fleet loyal to Caesar defeated a Pompeian fleet off its coast during the Roman civil war, and the remains of sunken ships from that fight are still visible in Mrtinovnik Bay on the island's north side.

On land, the island has well-preserved Illyrian burial mounds and fragments of a Roman villa near the bay of Rake. In the Bay of Mostir, the ruins of a Dominican monastery founded in 1465 — later the Church of Our Lady of Mercy — mark what was once a stop for sailors seeking shelter. The monastery was abandoned in the 18th century.

Šćedro has been a protected landscape since 1968, and it shows — the island has no mains electricity or running water, and its year-round population is small enough that estimates vary between sources, generally somewhere under twenty, with a few dozen more around in summer. Divers come for the Roman wreck site on the north side and, on the south side, the remains of a World War II aircraft now covered in coral.

Above water, the draw is simpler: quiet, well-protected coves — Lovišće and Mostir among them — with clear water and almost no development. It's the kind of place that's best reached during a gulet cruise along the Croatia coast rather than as a standalone day trip.