Sveti Klement

Sveti Klement is the largest of the Pakleni Islands, the small archipelago sitting just off Hvar's southern coast. At 5.28 square kilometres, with a deeply indented shoreline running to almost 30 kilometres, it is big enough to hold three tiny settlements but still feels like an escape from the bigger island across the channel — a fast boat or water taxi gets you there from Hvar Town in about 10 minutes.

An Archipelago Named for Pine Resin

The Pakleni chain is made up of sixteen islands and islets covering roughly 7.2 square kilometres between them, strung out along about ten kilometres of limestone off Hvar's southwestern shore. The highest point anywhere in the group, Vela glava, reaches only 94 metres, so nothing here rises far above the water. The name is routinely mistranslated as "hell's islands", but it has nothing to do with the Croatian word for hell: it comes from paklina, an old word for tar, and specifically for the pine resin that was tapped from the islands' Aleppo pines and used to waterproof ships' hulls.

Sveti Klement accounts for most of the archipelago's land area on its own. Its coast is bare and rocky, while parts of the interior are covered in maquis scrub and low pine woodland, with pockets of cultivated ground in between. Three settlements sit on the island — Palmižana, Momića Polje and Vlaka — and none of them is permanently inhabited; they fill up for the season and empty again in autumn. The island takes its name from Saint Clement, and a small church dedicated to him stands inland, away from the bays where the boats tie up.

Palmižana, the Meneghello Garden and the Marina

Most visitors land at Palmižana, a horseshoe-shaped bay on the island's northeast side roughly 3.5 kilometres from Hvar Town. The bay's story is tied to one family. Three Meneghello brothers left Venice for the eastern Adriatic — one settled in Split, one in the Bay of Kotor, and the third, Matteo, on Hvar. He bought land here, and a house went up on the bare hillside in 1820, later remodelled by his descendant, Professor Eugen Meneghello.

From 1906 Eugen began planting the botanical garden that still defines the place: palms, agave, cacti, eucalyptus, aloe vera and lilies, later joined by prickly pear, mimosa, laurel, olives and aromatic herbs. Rosemary spread so widely that Palmižana picked up the nickname "the island of the rosemary". He opened the villa as a guesthouse, first to friends and then to travellers, and the family opened Palmižana to wider tourism in 1950. A later generation — including Dagmar, a journalist from Zagreb who arrived in the late 1960s and brought contemporary art onto the property — kept it running, and the garden and the restaurants, Restaurant Marina and Bacchus among them, are still in family hands.

The bay is also home to ACI Marina Palmižana, which has room for around 200 boats with 160 serviced berths, water and power on the pontoons, and the usual reception, restaurant, showers and small shop. It runs from the middle of March to the end of October. On the southern side of the island, Vinogradišće Bay is the other name that comes up constantly — sheltered enough to hold decent weather, with restaurants and beach clubs along the shore that fill up in the evening.

The Roman Villa at Soline

Sveti Klement is not only a summer address. In Soline cove, a naturally protected inlet on the island's southern shore, archaeologists have uncovered part of a Roman villa dated by its finds from the 1st to the 6th century AD, together with a maritime base that appears to go back to the 2nd century AD. The excavations point to a self-contained little economy built on agricultural produce and salt production, and the pottery recovered from the site — Roman and late antique alike — reflects trading connections running right across the Mediterranean.

Grga Novak first investigated the cove in the 1950s. Systematic work began in 2007 under Branko Kirigin and has continued since 2011 under Marina Ugarković, run jointly by the Hvar Heritage Museum and the Institute of Archaeology with German and Austrian partners, combining geophysical survey, targeted probes and underwater investigation. Soline was designated protected cultural property in 2008. Vlaka, the hamlet nearest to it, is a scatter of stone houses with a chapel, vineyards, vegetable plots and olive groves — the closest thing the island has to a working village.

Getting There and When to Go

Taxi boats leave the Hvar Town riva through the day in season, roughly every 20 to 30 minutes from around nine in the morning, running to Palmižana, Ždrilca, Jerolim, Mlini and Stipanska; crossings take between five and fifteen minutes depending on where you are headed. There is no need to book ahead, and the last boats back run late into the evening in high summer.

Like most of Hvar's satellite islands, Sveti Klement gets crowded in July and August. June, September, or simply arriving early or late in the day are the better bets if you want the place closer to how the Meneghellos found it. Sveti Klement has long been a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Croatia, mostly because it delivers a quieter version of Hvar without actually mooring in Hvar Town's more crowded harbour.