Stari Grad Plain

When Greek colonists from Paros founded Pharos, now Stari Grad, in 384 BC, they divided the fertile plain behind it into rectangular parcels separated by dry stone walls, a chora laid out with surveying instruments to a grid of roughly 180 by 900 metres. What makes it a World Heritage site, inscribed in 2008, is that the grid survived: the same boundaries, walls, tracks and water cisterns are in use, and the plain is still worked for vines and olives, so the ancient land division is not an excavation but a functioning agricultural landscape. Field shelters of dry stone stand at the corners of parcels.

History

In 384 BC Greeks from the island of Paros colonised Stari Grad and divided the plain behind it into 75 parcels of about 16 hectares each, bordered by dry stone walls, and built small stone huts, called trims, for tools and shelter, along with cisterns and gutters to keep rainwater through the dry Mediterranean summer. In 229 BC the town became the residence of Demetrius of Pharos, an Illyrian ruler who briefly resisted the Romans, and by the mid-2nd century BC it was a Roman colony trading in grapes and fish. Farming in the chora has gone on without a break for 24 centuries, with the walls maintained by each generation and the same crops, mainly grapes and olives, still grown, and the plain was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2008 (Wikipedia, Stari Grad Plain).

The main sights

• A Greek grid from 384 BC - parcels laid out with surveying instruments.
• The same boundaries still used - walls, tracks and cisterns in service.
• Vines and olives - the plain worked, not preserved.
• Dry stone field shelters - standing at parcel corners.

When to go

April to October; harvest is in September and October. Half a day.

Things to know

To an untrained eye this is a field of vines with stone walls - the interest is entirely in knowing what the lines are. There is little interpretation on the ground. It is hot and unshaded in summer. Tracks are gravel.

Nearby

Stari Grad is at the western end; Vrboska and Jelsa are east.

Key facts