Magarna Bay

Magarna is an uninhabited bay on the southeast side of Zlarin Island, in the Sibenik archipelago — not part of the Kornati islands, but a short hop from the mainland: Zlarin sits barely 2 kilometres off the coast near Sibenik and is reached by a regular ferry that also carries most visitors to the island's only settlement. The island is small, a little over 8 square kilometres with about 18.7 kilometres of coastline, and rises to only 174 metres at Klepac, so nothing on it is ever far from the water.

Anchoring at Magarna

The bay is undeveloped and reachable only by boat, with a stony, partly weedy seabed around 6 to 8 metres deep; several pilot guides note the holding is not always reliable, so it suits a daytime stop more than an overnight anchorage. Soundings run from roughly three metres at the head of the bay out to nine towards the entrance, and the bottom changes character across the bay — sand in patches, rock and weed elsewhere — which is why an anchor can bite hard in one spot and drag in another a boat length away, and why anyone staying the night usually sets a second one. There is no quay, no water, no shore power and nothing to walk to. On an island that already has almost no traffic, Magarna is the quiet end of it.

Zlarin, the Coral Island

Zlarin is known above all for one thing: red coral. The first written records of Zlarin coral hunters date to the 15th century, and for generations the men worked the seabed with a tool called the inzenj, or St Andrew's cross — a wooden frame weighted with a heavy stone, dragged along the bottom to snag the coral and tear it loose. The knowledge was passed from father to son, and what came up was cut and polished in the village into jewellery that is still sold there today.

The tradition now has a proper home. The Croatian Coral Center opened on the island in 2023, in two restored stone houses known as Kazerma and Sare, along with the lanes around them and the access road up from the port. It was built through an EU-funded project worth roughly 3.2 million euros and run by the City of Sibenik, and it covers harvesting, processing and trade alongside the marine ecosystem the coral comes from. In 2026 it was given a European Heritage Award in the citizens' engagement and awareness-raising category.

Zlarin has also made a point of what it does not have. It is one of the very few Adriatic islands where cars are not allowed — tractors and small utility vehicles do the hauling — and in 2019 it became the first Croatian island to ban single-use plastics, taking straws, cutlery and bags out of its shops and cafés.

An Island That Emptied Out

Traces of Illyrian and Roman settlement have been found on Zlarin, and the island turns up in writing in 1245, in a document of King Bela IV. From the 13th to the 19th century it was held by the bishops of Sibenik and a handful of noble families, and the population swelled through the 15th and 16th centuries as people fled the Ottoman advance on the mainland. The churches date that boom: Our Lady of Raselj, the oldest on the island, goes back to the first half of the 15th century, the parish church was rebuilt in baroque style between 1735 and 1740 with seven altars, and the Leroj clock tower went up in 1839. Borovica, on the slope behind the harbour, was the island's first settlement and dates from the Middle Ages, and a brackish spring called Vrulja served the village as a place to wash clothes.

Then it emptied. Phylloxera and downy mildew wrecked the vineyards, cheap imported olive oil undercut the groves, and steamships finished off the local sailing trade, and Zlariners left in numbers for North and South America, with a second wave after the Second World War. Today around 293 people are registered on the island and roughly 284 stay through the winter, while the summer population climbs to something closer to 1,500.

Getting to Zlarin

The ferry from Sibenik takes about 25 minutes and runs some eight times a day in season, with sailings that continue to or from Vodice. The ride out through the Sibenik channel, past the St Nicholas Fortress guarding the mouth of the Krka estuary, is worth the fare on its own; the fortress is a UNESCO World Heritage site, as is the cathedral of St James back in the town. The wider archipelago runs to well over two hundred islands, islets and reefs with only about ten inhabited settlements among them — Zlarin the coral island and neighbouring Krapanj, the sponge island, being the two best known.

Zlarin itself is car-free and quiet enough that the walk from the ferry to the far side of the island takes an afternoon. Undeveloped and unserviced, Magarna is best reached during a Sibenik gulet cruise rather than as a standalone day trip.