Lastovo

Lastovo was a closed military zone from 1976 to 1988 - foreigners could not visit and the island was effectively sealed - which stopped the development that reshaped most of the Adriatic islands in the same decades, and left it with its forest cover, its field pattern and its architecture intact. It was declared a nature park in 2006, covering the island and forty-odd islets around it. The chimneys of Lastovo village, tall and elaborately built, are a local peculiarity found nowhere else. Because it is remote and has almost no light pollution, the sky here is exceptionally dark and the park promotes it for that.

History

The first mention of the island is in the 6th-century lexicon of Stephanus of Byzantium, who called it Ladesta after the 4th-century BC historian Theopompus; the Romans renamed it Augusta Insula, the emperor's island, which became Lagusta in the Middle Ages and, with a Slavic ending, Lastovo. People lived in the Rača cave from the late Neolithic, Greek pottery shows the island on the Greek trade routes of the Adriatic, and the Romans left country estates, water cisterns called lokve and a settlement at Ubli that flourished in the first centuries AD and was later abandoned. Croats settled the island after the 7th century, and around 950 the emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus named it Lastobon. In 998 the Venetian doge Pietro Orseolo II sailed against the Croatian and Neretvian pirates of the islands, and in 1000 the town of Lastovo was destroyed; its people rebuilt it on a hill inland, easier to defend, and turned to farming. In 1185 Lastovo is recorded as part of the new diocese of Hvar (Wikipedia, Lastovo).

The landscape

• A closed military island until 1988 - which is why it stayed as it is.
• A nature park since 2006 - the island and about forty islets.
• Tall decorated chimneys - a building form peculiar to Lastovo village.
• Very dark skies - almost no light pollution anywhere on it.

When to go

May to September; ferries are sparse and long in winter. Several days.

What to expect

Getting here takes hours by sea and schedules are limited - this is not a day trip. Services are few and seasonal. Water and supplies are shipped in. Roads are narrow. There is no nightlife, which is the point.

Nearby

Korcula is north; Mljet is east.

Key facts