Hiking Croatia – Korcula Island

We’re off today via catamaran to our third island, Korcula. The highlight for me personally, was walking through the small villages and getting a sense of the vibe of life here, knowing that these villages had been home for families for generations and in some cases multiple centuries.

The other highlight is arriving on the island where Marco Polo, sometimes called the world’s first tourist, was supposedly born. Who would have thought this Venitien began his adventurous life on this coast of the Adriatic.

We will leave that explorer for now and do our own exploring as we step off the boat to hike through our first small, roughly 500 inhabitants, agricultural village of Punat, As the plaque in the photos below tells us, Punat has been settled for over 1,000 years.

Down trails we went, winding alongside the grape vines and olive groves.

We continued hiking up a trail in the direction of Zmovo, a collection of small hamlets, past interesting rock formations, what appeared to be cave entrances, and heavy forest.

Making our way into the village of Zmovo, we find a charming town with buildings that seem to be as old as the mountains around them.

With a beautiful day of hiking behind us, we’re off to the village of Korcula, to find our bags and rooms at the Port 9 Hotel and Resort.

Dinner on our own and we opt to take the local village ferry across the bay to Old Town. The area is teeming with locals and tourists. We browsed for a moment through the shops. The legend is that Marco Polo lived in a house that is now a little tourist shop, but there is no documentation for that. (If Marco Polo’s exploits are of interest to you, I recommend Laurence Bergreen’s Marco Polo, From Venice to Xanadu.)

There is a beautiful gothic cathedral at the top of the hill that, given more time (and more energy after seven miles of hiking), I would have explored. Instead, I dawdled at the gift shops.

We found an outdoor restaurant overlooking the water. Following dinner, the obligatory stop at one of the many gelato shops ended a beautiful, relaxing evening following a beautiful day of hiking the villages of Korcula.