St. Jerolim Island

St. Jerolim is a small, uninhabited island in the Pakleni archipelago, the chain of islets that shelters the harbour of Hvar town from the southwest. It is the closest of the group to Hvar and the first stop on the taxi-boat route out of town, and for the past seventy years it has been known mainly for one thing: naturism. It lies in Split-Dalmatia County, well south of Istria, and has nothing to do with Pula, a confusion worth clearing up straight away, because a different island of the same name sits up there.

The Island and Its Archipelago

Jerolim covers just 0.207 square kilometres, with a coastline of 2.37 kilometres and no permanent residents. It belongs to a group of 16 islands totalling a little over 7 square kilometres, strung out across roughly ten kilometres of water; the highest point in the whole chain, Vela glava, reaches only 94 metres. The islands are limestone, covered in low forest of Aleppo and black pine, and were declared a protected significant landscape in 1968. They now also form part of the Natura 2000 network.

The largest of them, Sveti Klement, runs to about 5.3 square kilometres and is the only one with settlements: Palmizana, Momica Polje and Vlaka. Palmizana has a well-protected yacht marina and a botanical garden begun by the Meneghello family in the early twentieth century, and it is where most charter boats end up if they want to stay overnight in the group. Jerolim, by contrast, has no marina, no road and no year-round population at all.

What the Names Actually Mean

The archipelago's Croatian name, Pakleni otoci, is routinely mistranslated as the Hell Islands. It actually comes from paklina, an old word for the pine resin once collected here and used to seal and waterproof wooden ships: an industry, not an insult. Jerolim itself takes its name from Saint Jerome, the fourth-century translator of the Bible into Latin who was born in Dalmatia and turns up in place names all along this coast.

Which is how the mix-up with Pula happens. There is a second Sveti Jerolim in the Brijuni archipelago off Istria, part of the national park there: 7.84 hectares, a coastline of 1.16 kilometres, reached by private boat or on organised trips from Fazana and Pula. That one genuinely did have a church and monastery, destroyed when the island was quarried for stone under Austro-Hungarian rule. Only the foundation of one wall survives, and the stone went to Pula, Veli Brijun and Venice. The Hvar Jerolim has no such ruins, and no organised excursions from Istria reach it.

Visiting Jerolim Today

Jerolim has been a naturist island since the 1950s and is generally described as Croatia's first official naturist beach. The shoreline is a mix of rock, small pebble coves and pine shade, with a beach bar and restaurant and basic facilities behind it. Sea shoes are worth packing, because there is very little sand anywhere on the island.

Getting across is straightforward. Taxi boats leave the Hvar town riva every twenty to thirty minutes through the summer and take about five to ten minutes, so the island works perfectly well as a half-day escape from a town that gets extremely busy in August. From the water it is simply the first anchorage you reach heading southwest, which is why many charter guests exploring Croatia anchor here for the afternoon before carrying on through the rest of the Pakleni group.