Stari Grad — "old town" in Croatian — was founded as the Greek colony of Pharos in 384 BC, making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited towns in Europe. It is the architectural heart of Hvar island, a quiet stone town tucked at the end of a long, deep inlet on the north coast. The narrow lanes wind back from the harbour past Renaissance houses, small piazzas with lemon trees, and the heavy stone walls of Tvrdalj Castle, the fortified summer residence of the poet Petar Hektorović.
Tvrdalj is the headline visit — Hektorović's sixteenth-century house arranged around a saltwater fish pond, with quotations from Latin and Croatian carved into the walls. The Dominican Monastery, just across the way, holds a small but startling Tintoretto and a collection of archaeological finds from the Greek period. Behind the town, the Stari Grad Plain preserves the same rectangular field divisions the Greek settlers laid out in the fourth century BC, unchanged for over two millennia and inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Allow half a day in town, or stay the night.