Osjak Island

Few places in the Adriatic pack as much history into as little land as Osljak. Written on some older charts, and in a good deal of travel writing, as Osjak, this pine-covered speck of limestone sits in the middle of the Zadar Channel, close enough to the mainland that you can watch the city lights come on after dinner, yet quiet enough that its winter population would barely fill one long table. For anyone cruising the Zadar archipelago it is the kind of stop that takes twenty minutes to walk across and stays with you far longer.

The Smallest Permanently Inhabited Island in Croatia

Osljak covers about 0.39 square kilometres, with cadastral surveys putting the land area closer to 0.33, a coastline of roughly 2.41 kilometres, and a single summit that is confusingly also called Lazaret rising to around 90 metres. Those dimensions make it the smallest permanently inhabited island in Croatia. The 2021 census counted 35 residents in the island's one settlement, also called Osljak, whose stone houses are strung along the western shore facing the Ugljan villages of Preko and Kali. Roughly sixty traditional Mediterranean houses stand there in total.

What makes that number unusual is its direction of travel. The 2011 census had recorded only 29 people here, so Osljak is one of the very few small Croatian islands to have gained residents between censuses rather than lost them. The seasonal swing is dramatic all the same: in winter perhaps ten people actually sleep on the island, while in July and August every available bed is taken and returning families reopen houses that stand shuttered the rest of the year.

Distances here are measured in metres rather than miles. About 780 metres of water separate Osljak from Kali and roughly 940 metres from Preko, which is why the island is usually described as lying half a nautical mile off Ugljan. Zadar is a short hop across the channel in the other direction, and the Jadrolinija car ferry working the Zadar (Gazenica) to Osljak to Preko route calls here several times a day, all year, with the full mainland crossing taking about 25 minutes. There is no shop on the island, not even at the height of summer, and only one seasonal place to eat and drink, so nearly everyone arrives carrying what they need.

Lazaret: Plague, Quarantine and an Older Name

Islanders and the neighbouring villages rarely use the name Osljak at all. To them the place is Lazaret, and the word is not decorative. A quarantine station was raised here in 1630 to serve the whole Zadar region, and through the seventeenth century the island worked as an isolation hospital where people carrying plague or suffering from leprosy were brought to recover or to die. Its earlier name was Calugera, after the noble Calogera family who owned the island and built a summer residence with gardens on it; the ruins of that estate can still be picked out among the trees.

Deeper layers survive as well. The remains of a Roman villa rustica lie beneath an early church that local heritage records place in the 6th century, later rededicated to the Assumption of the Virgin and still the focus of the island's feast day, Vela Gospa, on 15 August. A ruined windmill, generally dated to the sixteenth century, once ground grain for the surrounding islands. The tight little hamlet of Valcic, around ten stone buildings pressed together, was put up across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From the Second World War there is a bunker and a rainwater reservoir built during the Italian occupation, and that reservoir is still in use today.

A Forest Park With No Roads and No Cars

Osljak has been protected as a forest park since 1985. Aleppo pine, cypress, holm oak and olive cover most of the surface, laced with Mediterranean maquis; surveys have identified ten habitat types on this very small area, four of which are protected, and the woodland shelters nesting birds. There are no roads and no vehicular surfaces of any kind, which means no cars: everything on Osljak happens on foot or, at a push, by bicycle, and supplies come off the ferry by hand.

A single walking trail a little over two kilometres long circles the island, climbing through the pines past the windmill ruins and the overgrown Calogera gardens to the small lighthouse, then dropping back to the harbour. It takes under an hour at a gentle pace, and the views open out in every direction, with Ugljan and its ferry traffic on one side and the Zadar waterfront with the Velebit range behind it on the other. Because the whole island is protected, the woodland has been left largely to itself, and the contrast with the built-up shore opposite is immediate.

Stopping at Osljak Under Sail

Almost every boat working between Zadar and the Kornati passes within sight of the island, and it repays a short stop: a swim off the rocks, a walk under the pines, a look at the church, and back aboard. It is one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet cruise in Croatia, and it earns its place on an itinerary precisely because it is the opposite of the busy quays at Preko or the crowded old-town moorings in Zadar. Treat it as a shore excursion rather than a base, since there is nothing to reprovision with, keep clear of the ferry lane running through the channel, and you get one of the quietest landfalls in Dalmatia barely half an hour from a city of some seventy thousand people.