Stari Grad Old Town

The old town of Stari Grad sits at the end of a long, sheltered bay on the north side of Hvar. Its name means simply "old town", and it is old: Greek settlers from the Aegean island of Paros founded a colony here in 384 BC and called it Pharos. Its oldest part falls within the Stari Grad Plain UNESCO World Heritage Site, inscribed in 2008, and the whole municipality lies in the protected buffer zone around it.

The Greeks laid out the fertile plain east of the town in a grid of rectangular plots divided by stone walls, and that field system is still farmed. The town itself passed through Illyrian, Roman and Slavic hands; in Roman times it was called Faria, a name that later became Hvar. When the Venetians moved the island's administration to the south coast in the late 13th century, the new capital took the name Hvar and the original town became Stari Grad. It was burned in an Ottoman raid in 1571 and rebuilt slowly. Trade by sea in the 17th and 18th centuries paid for the extended waterfront and the stone houses that give the town its present shape.

Walking the old town means narrow paved lanes, small squares and stone houses with green shutters, most of them from that period of rebuilding. Trg Škor, a small square enclosed by houses and reached through archways, is one of the most photographed corners. On the waterfront stands Tvrdalj, the fortified summer house of the 16th-century poet Petar Hektorović, built around a fishpond. The Dominican monastery of St Peter Martyr guards its art collection on the edge of the centre, the church of St Stephen rises over the main square, and the Stari Grad Museum in the Biankini palace shows finds from the plain, the reconstruction of an ancient Greek shipwreck and a 19th-century captain's room.

Stari Grad is calmer than Hvar town and still lived in year-round, with a town band founded in 1876 and an amateur theatre dating from 1893. Ferries from Split arrive at the port just outside town, so it is also where many visitors first set foot on the island.