Ilovik

Ilovik is a small, car-free island at the southern end of the Lošinj archipelago, in the Kvarner Gulf. It covers about 5.8 square kilometres, has roughly 15 kilometres of coastline and rises to only 95 metres at a hill called Dida. Almost everyone who comes here arrives by boat, and almost everyone who stays does so for the same reason: nothing much happens, and that is precisely the point.

A Small Island at the End of the Lošinj Chain

Ilovik lies immediately south of the island of Lošinj, separated from it by the Ilovik Strait. Administratively it belongs to the town of Mali Lošinj in Primorje-Gorski Kotar County, which is worth stating plainly because the island is often filed under Zadar in charter listings and guidebooks. There is no administrative or geographic link between the two; Zadar is simply one of the ports a fast ferry runs from. Local boats even carry ML registration marks, for Mali Lošinj.

The 2021 census recorded 106 residents, nearly all of them in the single village, also called Ilovik, which sits along the channel facing the islet of Sveti Petar. That is a long way down from the 385 people counted in 1857, and the diaspora now outnumbers the island itself: by most accounts several times more people of Ilovik descent live in the United States than on Ilovik. Fishing, sheep, olives and small-scale agriculture supported the population for generations; tourism does most of the work today, through a handful of restaurants, a single shop and rooms in private houses rather than hotels.

From Neumae Insulae to Ilovik

The island first appears in the written record around 1071 under the name Neumae Insulae, and from the thirteenth century it was known as Sanctus Petrus de Nimbis, later Italianised as San Pietro dei Nembi, after the monastery on the neighbouring islet. The present Croatian name arrived with settlers who came at the end of the eighteenth century from Veli Lošinj; their descendants make up most of the population today.

Long before that, the area belonged to the Liburnians, the seafaring Illyrian people who controlled this stretch of the Adriatic, and then to Rome. Roman-era walls, sarcophagi and coin finds have turned up on both Ilovik and Sveti Petar, along with an underwater archaeological site in the channel between them — unsurprising, given that the sheltered passage has served as an anchorage for as long as ships have sailed here. In the twentieth century the island changed hands twice on paper: it passed to Italy under the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920 and to Yugoslavia under the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947.

Sveti Petar: Monastery, Fortress and Anchorage

The islet of Sveti Petar lies a few hundred metres offshore, about 2.5 kilometres long and only 300 metres wide, and it holds most of Ilovik's history. The island cemetery is enclosed by walls belonging to an eleventh-century Benedictine monastery, and a Byzantine fortification stood on the same ground before it. In 1600 the Venetian commander Filippo Pasqualigo built a castle here, part of the Republic's long effort to suppress Uskok raiding in the northern Adriatic. A Franciscan summer residence stands nearby.

The channel between Ilovik and Sveti Petar is the practical heart of the place. It is protected from almost every direction, with the sirocco and, to a lesser degree, the bora being the exceptions, and it has long been one of the standard overnight stops for boats moving between the northern and central Adriatic. Anchoring depths are modest, the bottom holds well, and a small number of moorings handle the summer traffic.

The Island of Flowers

Ilovik's local name is the Island of Flowers, and it is not a marketing invention. Residents have planted oleander, bougainvillea, rosemary, palms and eucalyptus around their stone houses for generations, some of the eucalyptus trees now roughly two hundred years old, and the effect in early summer is startling for an island this small. Roughly two-thirds of the land is covered in forest and macchia scrub, with olive groves and vineyards worked in the gaps between.

The beaches are modest and mostly unequipped. Paržine, on the southeastern side about twenty minutes' walk from the village, is the largest and the only genuinely sandy one; Parknu, Harbac, Šoto Pini and Sidro are smaller coves. None of them have facilities, so anything you need comes from the village first.

Getting There and When to Go

There is no car ferry and no need for one, since private cars are not permitted on the island. Passenger boats and catamarans connect Ilovik with Mali Lošinj through the year and, seasonally, with Rijeka, Pula and Zadar; in summer there are also day-trip boats from Mali Lošinj. The island's main feast, Petrova, falls on 28 and 29 June for Saints Peter and Paul and is the busiest day of the local calendar. Its quiet, undeveloped character makes Ilovik a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Croatia sailing through the Kvarner and Lošinj area, usually as an overnight anchorage rather than a destination in its own right.