Sestrunj Otok

Sestrunj is a small island in the Zadar Archipelago, lying between Ugljan, Rivanj and Dugi Otok about 15 kilometres from Zadar. It covers roughly 15.1 square kilometres, and at the 2011 census its population was just 48 — almost all of them in the island's single settlement, also called Sestrunj, which sits inland on high ground rather than down by the water. There is no shop and no café.

A Ridge Rising Out of the Sea

Islanders describe Sestrunj as a mountain growing out of the sea, and the shape bears that out. It runs some seven to eight kilometres long and nowhere much more than two kilometres wide, built around a narrow limestone ridge whose high point, Obručar — known locally as Sridnji — reaches 186 metres. Three channels wrap around it: the Sestrunjski to the south-east, the Rivanjski to the north-west and the Srednji to the south. That ring of water is a large part of why the island has stayed as quiet as it has.

Around 80 per cent of the surface is covered in forest, maquis shrubland and low woodland rather than the bare stone common elsewhere in the archipelago. The coast is indented with four main bays — Kablin, Hrvatinj, Muline and Triluke — and the surrounding sea has long had a reputation for good fishing. What the island has never had is a natural spring; for most of its history households depended entirely on rainwater collected in cisterns.

Liburnians, Venetians and the Year the Island Bought Itself

People have been on Sestrunj since at least the 10th century BC, when the Liburnians settled it. They left burial mounds and two dry stone hillforts, on the heights called Gračina and Gračinica, which can still be traced today. The Romans came for the stone, quarrying the island for building material. Under Venetian rule between the 15th and 18th centuries the islanders lived off fishing, quarrying, olives and the making of bricks and roof tiles.

Two churches mark the later centuries: St Peter and Paul, from the 16th century, and Our Lady of Health, built in 1602. St Peter remains the village patron and his feast is still kept.

The date the islanders themselves remember, though, is 1904. Until then Sestrunj belonged to the Borelli family, Zadar nobility, and its inhabitants owed dues in crops and livestock. That year thirty families took out a loan from an Austrian bank and bought the island outright for 32,000 crowns, ending the feudal arrangement and making the islanders owners of the ground they had always worked. Olive growing survived the transition, and the oil mill at Kablin is still part of the island's working furniture.

Getting There, and What Is Actually There

Sestrunj has two small harbours. Kablin, on the south-western side, is the main one and takes the ferries; Hrvatin, on the north-eastern coast, serves as the alternative when strong southerly winds make Kablin untenable. The Jadrolinija car ferry on line 433, running Zadar – Rivanj – Sestrunj – Zverinac – Molat, calls daily through the summer and up to four times a week in winter, taking roughly an hour and a half from Zadar. The catamaran on line 9404, Brbinj – Božava – Zverinac – Sestrunj – Rivanj – Zadar, runs every day year-round and covers the distance in about an hour.

Beyond that, expectations are best set honestly. There is no tourist infrastructure to speak of, no marina, and no single attraction that anyone queues for. The draw is the absence of all of it: quiet bays, a hilltop village of stone houses, olive terraces, and a coastline you can have largely to yourself even in August. The island livens up once a year for Sestrunj Night, held on the last Saturday in July.

That combination — sheltered water, no crowds and a short hop from Zadar as well as from Rivanj, Zverinac and Dugi Otok — is exactly why Sestrunj works better from the deck of a boat than from a ferry timetable, and why it is a classic stop on a Croatia blue cruise itinerary rather than somewhere people book a week in.