Tiha Bay

Tiha Bay sits on the northern side of Starogradski Zaljev, the long inlet that leads to Stari Grad on Hvar. It is not really one bay at all but a cluster of seven smaller coves, Stupisce, Vucja, Srednja Lokva, Veli Dolac, Paklena, Hobonj and Uza, cut into an uninhabited, thickly wooded shore. Each faces a slightly different direction, which means that whatever the wind is doing there is normally somewhere inside Tiha that is flat and quiet, and that is the reason the bay turns up so regularly on sailing itineraries around Hvar.

The Coves and How They Shelter

Starogradski Zaljev is one of the longest natural inlets in the Adriatic, running roughly 6 kilometres into the island from the channel between Hvar and Brac. That length is what makes it so useful to a crew: swell dies away well before the head of the bay, and the hills on either side break most of the wind. Tiha lies on the northern shore, on the port hand as you come in, and the first thing to note on the approach is the rock off the western point at Mali Rati, which needs a sensible offing.

Local practice on the coves is straightforward. When the maestral, the reliable afternoon north-westerly of the Adriatic summer, is blowing, or when the wind is in the west, the western side of the bay gives the better lee. When the bura comes down from the north-east, dry, gusty and often sudden, the eastern coves are the ones to be in. The two middle arms, Srednja Lokva and Veli Dolac, are generally reckoned safe in all conditions, which is why they fill up first on a busy August evening.

Anchoring, Buoys and What Is Ashore

Anchoring is uncomplicated. Depths inside the coves run to around 10 metres, with more water further out in the bay, and the bottom is sand and weed that holds well once the anchor is properly set. There are also somewhere in the region of 40 mooring buoys spread across the seven coves, which in high season is often the simpler option and stops boats swinging into one another in the narrower arms.

Ashore, the offering is deliberately small. There is a konoba at Veli Dolac, a family-run place known for its roast and grilled meat and fish, plus a restaurant and lounge bar elsewhere in the bay, and beyond that essentially nothing: no village, no shops, no road worth the name. Stari Grad is about two and a half nautical miles away for provisions, fuel and everything else, close enough to be convenient and far enough that Tiha stays quiet. That emptiness is precisely the appeal, with pine and holm oak running down to the waterline, a few small pebble beaches where sea shoes are worth having, and clear water over a pale bottom.

Stari Grad at the Head of the Inlet

The town at the end of the bay is one of the oldest in Europe. Greek colonists from the Cycladic island of Paros founded Pharos here in 384 BC, a date recorded by the historian Diodorus Siculus, who notes that the Parians were backed by Dionysius of Syracuse as he pushed his influence up the Adriatic. The choice of site was not accidental: a deep sheltered inlet, a large fertile plain immediately inland and dependable fresh water are exactly what a colony needed, and they are still the reason the town sits where it does.

That plain is why Stari Grad carries a UNESCO listing. The Greek settlers surveyed the Stari Grad Plain and divided it into a grid of rectangular plots bounded by dry-stone walls, the chora of the colony, and the layout has remained in agricultural use ever since, some twenty-four centuries of continuous cultivation of vines and olives inside essentially the same field boundaries. It is regarded as the best-preserved ancient Greek cadastral system in the Mediterranean and was inscribed on the World Heritage list in 2008. From an anchorage in Tiha it is a short trip inland, and unlike most archaeological sites it is still a working landscape rather than a fenced ruin.

Stari Grad itself is a low-key working town rather than a resort, and its best-known building is Tvrdalj, the fortified house that the poet and nobleman Petar Hektorovic, who lived from 1487 to 1572, built for himself in the sixteenth century. Its centrepiece is a walled saltwater fish pond, still stocked with grey mullet and fed by a channel from the sea, set inside a Renaissance garden and arcaded walkways. Hektorovic conceived the whole property as a small self-contained world in which fish, birds, plants and people each had their place, and the same preoccupation runs through his best-known work, the poem Fishing and Fishermen's Chat, published in 1555. The harbour beside it is the main port for this part of the island, so a crew that has spent the night at anchor in Tiha can step off the quay into provisions, fuel and several centuries of stonework within a couple of streets.

Fitting Tiha Into a Cruise

Hvar is 68 kilometres long and about ten wide, and with more than 2,700 hours of sunshine a year it is the sunniest of the Croatian islands. Most of the attention goes to the southern side: Hvar town, the nightlife, and the Pakleni Islands scattered off the western tip with their marina at Palmizana. The northern coast, where Tiha lies, is the quieter half of the same island, and the contrast is genuinely useful on a week's cruise, since an evening at anchor among the trees can be followed by a morning run round to the bars and Renaissance squares if that is what the crew wants.

The sailing season here runs from roughly May to October, with July and August the busiest weeks and the shoulder months offering warm water without the competition for buoys. Between the sheltered water and the short hop to Stari Grad's restaurants and history, Tiha Bay is a classic stop on a Croatia blue cruise itinerary, usually as an overnight anchorage rather than a place to linger during the day: boats come in for the evening, eat ashore or on board, and are gone again by mid-morning.