Daily Times

You meet people who say Croatia is the new Italy. It used to be a part of the Venetian Republic, so there is logic here.

And Diocletian’s Palace in Split is one of the greatest Roman monuments. There are suggestions of Italy everywhere. You find spageti bolonjeze on menus and it’s not too hard to fathom the Italian influence there. But you also find Hrskava riblji zalogaji (Croatian crunchy fishbites), which reminds you how satisfyingly foreign this country is.

Croatia may be the least known, certainly the least understood, country in Europe. As a result, in just two hours from London, it offers an escape sensation that is exciting and profound. The more so if you visit nearly secret islands. And even more so if you find unusually comfortable places to stay when you get there.

Mainland Dubrovnik may be Croatia’s gift to package trippers, but a few days on the islands of Hvar or Dugi Otok are an experience of terra incognita.

Judith Schalansky’s surprise bestseller, Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, proved the popular appeal of quiet and isolation in our busy world. Magic counts for a lot. Hvar and Dugi Otok have it. Croatia achieved independence only in 1991, after several millennia of battles, invasions, compromises and miscellaneous predations from Greeks, Ottomans, Corsairs and lately, Serbs. It is now a country that belongs to the EU but it includes less precise, almost mythic, territories including Istria and Illyria. Or Dalmatia: my destination. Dalmatia is a vanished kingdom like Litva, Sabaudia, Tsernagora and Etruria. Thus, doubly romantic. And it’s still there.

The plane to Split, a fine modern airport with unusual efficiency, begins its descent near Venice. This reminds you how close Italy is, at least geographically speaking.

Ancona to the west is just 180 miles away. But Italy’s Adriatic coast comprises fine, long beaches while Croatia’s is an astonishing spectacle of rugged islands. Seen from the plane, an endless necklace of brown and green in all sizes is strung across a vividly blue sea.

Once, these islands were tips of mountains because in Flintstone days you could walk from Croatia to Italy without getting your felt-bound feet wet. The sight lets the mind wander to the lyrical and whimsical: Prospero’s island in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, HG Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. They could all be here.

The precise number of islands is a matter of pride and competitive bragging. Of course, it all depends on what you mean by ‘island’. Accordingly, estimates differ wildly but, in pursuit of clarity, I got advice from the cartographic department of the UK Hydrographic Office. The answer is: any landform surrounded by water with an area greater than a square kilometre is an island.

If it’s less than a tenth of a square kilometre, what you are seeing is merely a rock. By this method, Croatia has 1,246 islands.

Hvar is one of the biggest and was one of the Ancients’ Isles of the Blessed. The eponymous capital is now a notorious party town, a reinvention which began when Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson visited.

Its status as a venue for royal renegades was confirmed when Prince Harry was photographed jumping into a nightclub’s pool in 2011. There was a tradition of hoteliers giving the money back if the weather was bad though I think Harry and the boys may have put an end to that nice gesture. However, my destination is on the other side of Hvar island, somewhere much less visited than Harry’s town, nightclub-free and reached from Split by the hotel’s launch, driven by impossibly handsome, tanned young men in startling whites who serve champagne as we clatter over a roiling, navy blue sea whose consistency looks like oil.

Stari Grad Na Hvaru, the Old Town of Hvar, the Pharos of the Greeks, is where you disembark. It looks as if communist stage designers had been briefed to replicate Portofino. There’s a pretty old town, but prettiness cannot eliminate an undertow of Balkan darkness, even menace.

Saturday morning, feckless boys in the Hemingway Bar do glum Djokovic impressions. A nasty-looking communist-era supermarket threatens. In ample compensation, there is a distinctive strain of Croatian woman as handsome as the boys on the boat: tall, slim, high cheekbones and open-faced with superb posture. Maslina Resort, a project by a French financier, is on a perfect bay a few moments out of Stari Grad.