The catamaran comes in, everyone walks off the front, and the crowd turns left along the riva towards the bars. That is Hvar Town, and it is genuinely good at what it does. But the island is long and thin, and the far end of it runs at a different temperature entirely. Three towns sit along the northern side: Stari Grad, Jelsa and Vrboska. Plenty of visitors never see any of them.
Stari Grad has been a town since the Greeks laid it out
Stari Grad is the oldest town in Croatia, founded by Greek settlers as Pharos, and the plain behind it still carries the field division they cut in the 4th century BC. Stari Grad Plain is on the UNESCO World Heritage list for exactly that reason: a farming grid still in use after roughly twenty-four centuries. The town itself feels nothing like Hvar Town. Stone lanes that stay cool at four in the afternoon. A harbour that is a long inlet rather than an open bay, so the water lies flat and the light on it goes soft early. There are good places to eat and nowhere that plays music you can hear from a boat.
Jelsa is where people actually live
Jelsa has a square with trees in it, a supermarket that locals use, a football pitch and children. That sounds like faint praise. It is not. Jelsa is the town on Hvar where the year does not stop in October, and the effect in July is that the place has its own business to attend to. You are welcome to be there, but nobody is performing for you. The waterfront curls around a small harbour and the town climbs a little behind it. A short walk east brings you to pine-backed swimming spots that never quite fill up.
Vrboska is built along an inlet and its church has gun slits
Vrboska is tiny. It sits along a narrow inlet with bridges across it, which is why people call it a little Venice, a comparison that does it no favours and that you should ignore. What is worth going for is the church of St Mary, fortified in the sixteenth century against raids from the sea. It looks the part: thick walls, a defensive terrace, nothing decorative about the shape of it. The village around it is a few hundred metres of stone and moored boats. You can walk out of Vrboska by accident. That is part of the appeal.
Sleeping out here and visiting Hvar Town beats the reverse
The argument is simple arithmetic. Hvar Town is a very good day and a mediocre week. A day trip in gives you the theatre in the Arsenal, the climb to Fortica, dinner up in Groda where the lanes are too narrow for anybody to put a speaker, and the boat out to Palmizana. Then you leave, and the leaving is the good part. The other arrangement has you paying the highest rates on the island to sleep somewhere loud, in order to spend your days travelling to the places that are quiet.
Sailings between the towns change with the season and are worth checking against a current source such as Hvar.com, the island’s travel portal, rather than against last year’s memory of them.
Who this suits, and who will hate it
It suits anyone with small children, anyone who wants to swim before breakfast without negotiating a crowd, anyone with a hire car, and anyone whose holiday improves when dinner happens at eight rather than eleven. It does not suit people who came for the nightlife, and I mean that plainly. If your evening ends at three, do not book Vrboska and expect a taxi to materialise; the roads out there are dark and the drivers are asleep. It also disappoints people who want everything within two minutes of the room. Stari Grad and Jelsa are working towns with real distance between things, and Vrboska closes early because there is not much in it to keep open.
One thing nobody mentions about the north coast
This side faces the mainland. Your evening view is the grey wall of mountain across the channel rather than open water, and some people find that less romantic than they expected. Then the sun drops behind the island, the rock over there turns pink for about twenty minutes, and the argument ends. Bring a jumper anyway. Even in August the stone gives its heat back for a while after dark and then, quite suddenly, stops.
