Ugljan

Ugljan is the nearest of the larger Zadar archipelago islands to the mainland, separated from the city by a channel that ferries cross in about fifteen minutes to Preko, the island's administrative centre. It covers 50.2 square kilometres, runs roughly 22 kilometres from end to end, is nowhere much more than 3.8 kilometres wide, and has a coastline of almost 79 kilometres. At its southern end the Zdrelac bridge, in place since 1973, joins it to the neighbouring island of Pasman, so that the two together form a long, sheltered chain of villages, olive terraces and coves facing the Croatian coast.

Geography, Climate and the Villages

The island's spine rises to Scah at 286 metres, with the hill carrying the ruins of St Michael's fort a little lower at around 263 metres. Where the rock is limestone the ground is covered in macchia and left largely wild; the dolomite zones, mostly on the sheltered north-eastern side, carry the farmland. The climate is squarely Mediterranean, with an average annual temperature above 15 degrees Celsius and roughly 2,500 hours of sunshine a year, hot dry summers and mild, rainy winters. The bura blows cold off the mainland in winter, the jugo brings rain from the south-east, and in summer the maestral sets in reliably from the north-west through the afternoon.

Every one of the island's settlements lines the eastern shore, strung along a single road: Ugljan, Lukoran, Sutomiscica, Poljana, Preko, Kali and Kukljica, with the tiny islet of Osljak counted as an eighth. The 2011 census recorded 6,049 residents and the 2021 count 5,769, which still leaves Ugljan among the most densely populated of all Croatian islands. Kali is the largest village, with about 1,585 people. Sutomiscica keeps the baroque summer residence of the Zadar patrician Lantana family, built in the seventeenth century beside a walled park and chapel, along with a church of St Euphemia dating to the fourteenth. Kukljica, at the south-eastern tip beside the Pasman bridge, is often described as the gateway to the Kornati and Telascica national parks.

Preko itself is home to about 1,250 people, in a municipality of some 3,556 that also takes in the outlying islands of Rivanj and Sestrunj, while the village of Ugljan at the northern end is really a loose cluster of nine hamlets. Preko keeps a Romanesque church of St Ivan going back to the eleventh century, and a local memory of a harder era: the prijeske lavandijere, the Preko washerwomen who crossed the channel to launder clothes for Zadar households, sixteen of whom drowned in a single boating disaster in 1891.

Osljak, half a nautical mile off Preko, is a story of its own. It measures just 0.39 square kilometres and had 35 inhabitants at the 2021 census, making it the smallest permanently inhabited island in the Adriatic. There are no cars on it, the ferry calls twice a day, and islanders still refer to the place as Lazaret, a reminder that in the seventeenth century it served as the quarantine station where Zadar isolated cases of plague and leprosy. Today it is a protected forest park with a walking loop of a little over two kilometres through its pines.

The Olive Island

The nickname comes straight from the Croatian word for oil, ulje. Estimates put the number of olive trees on Ugljan at around 700,000, planted in dry-stone terraces that climb the slopes above every village, and the oil pressed from them is routinely described as the finest in Croatia. Olive growing here is not a recent enthusiasm: the grid of Roman land division, or centuriation, is still legible in the north-western part of the island.

The clearest proof stands at Muline, at the island's northern end, where the remains of a villa rustica include an oil mill of the first and second centuries AD. With five presses installed and an estimated seasonal output of some 85,000 litres, it was the largest Roman olive oil operation yet identified in Croatia and one of the more substantial anywhere in the Mediterranean, turning out the Liburnian oil that was traded from the first to the fifth century. The site also holds the ruins of the basilica of St John and a mausoleum, and a working replica of the ancient press has been built beside the original foundations.

Liburnians, Venetians and Glagolitic Monks

Ugljan has been settled since the Neolithic. In the Iron Age it belonged to the Liburnians, and after the Roman conquest in the first century BC it was absorbed into the territory of the colony of Iader, the ancestor of modern Zadar. Croatian settlement followed between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries, and the island appears under its present name in a document of 1325. Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it took in successive waves of refugees from Ravni Kotari on the mainland, driven onto the islands by the Ottoman advance.

Above Preko, a steep track climbs to the fort of St Michael. A stronghold was first raised on the summit by the Byzantines in the sixth century; the Republic of Venice rebuilt it in 1202, in the same campaign that saw the crusader army sack Zadar, and the fortress was besieged and taken by the Venetians again in 1345. From the walls the view runs across the channel to Zadar on one side and out over the scattered islands of the archipelago on the other.

Just offshore from Preko lies the wooded islet of Galevac, also called Skoljic, barely 650 metres around. A Zadar nobleman named Milanje gave it to the Franciscans in 1410; friars of the Third Order settled there from 1446, and Pope Nicholas V confirmed their possession in 1454. Their church of St Paul the Hermit dates from the fifteenth century, and over the years the monastery ran a printing works, a school and a quarantine station. Its library, protected as a cultural good of the Republic of Croatia since 2016, holds Glagolitic missals and breviaries printed in Rome, along with a 1527 edition of Marulic's Judita.

The village of Ugljan has its own Franciscan house, the monastery of St Jerome, founded in 1430 beside the sandy Mostir beach, its Gothic church consecrated in 1447. Inside are the Ugljan polyptych by the painter Ivan Petrov, among the most important Gothic panels to survive in Croatia, and the epitaph of Simun Kozicic Benja, who lived from 1460 to 1536 and is remembered for the Glagolitic printing house he set up at Rijeka. At Kukljica, meanwhile, a boat procession carrying the statue of Our Lady of the Snow between the votive chapel and the parish church has been held every 5 August since 1514.

Fishing Boats, Ferries and Quiet Coves

Kali is generally reckoned the largest fishing town on the Adriatic. Its fleet of around thirty modern vessels works out of a purpose-built fishing port, and Kali skippers have long crewed boats in the Atlantic and the Pacific. As early as 1937, three of the six engine-powered tuna boats then working the Adriatic came from this one village. Tuna ranching arrived in 1996, when returning Croatian-Australians set up the Mediterranean's first tuna farm here, and in 2009 the same operation succeeded in rearing bluefin from eggs, at the time only the second place in the world after Japan to manage it. Cages off the island now hold sea bream and sea bass as well as bluefin, and fishing and aquaculture still sit alongside tourism, which only began to develop here in the 1960s, as the twin pillars of the island economy.

Preko's ferry harbour is the busiest island port in Croatia by passenger numbers, handling well over 1.6 million passengers and around 260,000 vehicles a year on the short crossing from Zadar. Yachts have two options on the island: the Olive Island Marina at Sutomiscica, opened in 2007 with 200 berths, and the smaller marina at Preko. Swimming is easy to come by, from the developed Jaz beach just outside Preko, with lifeguards and step-free access, to the gravel of Batalaza at Kali, Kostanj near Kukljica, and the quieter Sabusa and Jelenica coves on the wilder western side, reached on foot in about a quarter of an hour.

Inland, the central plateau is criss-crossed by tens of kilometres of waymarked walking and cycling routes, and a coastal path links Preko with Kali and on to Kukljica past a string of swimming spots. The waymarked routes are short and gentle rather than demanding: the walk out to Kostanj cove covers 6.2 kilometres in about two hours, the longer loop to Sabusa 6.8 kilometres in something over two, both with barely more than forty metres of climbing. The steeper western coast has its own draw in the Zeljina cliff, one of the few climbing crags in the Zadar archipelago. Because the island sits directly on the route south from Zadar towards Telascica and the Kornati, many gulet cruises in Croatia call in here, whether to spend a night at Preko or Kukljica or simply to pass through the Zdrelac strait on the way further down the coast.